December 14th: Jenny Gropp Hess

Ornaments of Providence & Welded Water

snowy December
sunshine.
           instead of a hot air balloon
           I have cardinals
                       in melted birdbath water,
           like a well-meaning professor
                       saying morning.
 
            ***
 
I drink a sunlit whiskey,
        a belt of coal
right through me.
    
            ***
poke
                  at the ice tray,
disrupt a cube.
   
           ***
remembered names,
           like black holes
           folded into hand-passed
                        notes.
 
            ***
 
O Mailman,
             your thousand boxes
             are spots on a bush
             where berries grow.
                            if someone dies
              or moves away,
                            another berry
        in the same place.
   
                  ***
 
somewhere the parrot
                 and the aloe
                 will outlive me
                 beautifully.
   
                  ***
above, the sky
             slow-churns icily,
             crosses like freezer gin.
a cold pilot light
              lit.

 

Jenny Gropp Hess attends the University of Alabama and edits the Black Warrior Review. Her work appears in or is forthcoming from Colorado Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Parcel, Unsaid, Seneca Review, and others.

December 13th: Cori A. Winrock

Bioluminescent Christmas Trees

This greening our night
an unhasping-of. Phosphor

-escent nursery. Glasphalted sky.

The saw-song gleams friction,
cuts its own kind of light.

Strapped to our cars, strung
along roadways. An oceanscape

draped across foyers—the trees,

then, afterglow

on the turned-off curves
of television screens.

: : :

Glitter the gold into each needle
until brightness clutters & spills, tinsels

our eyes. Until sick with halo

we swaddle the dazzle
in burlap sacks like statues

wrapped & hauled, wept

out of our houses
into the nearest unfrozen body of

water—afterimages adrift
in our retinas like flashlillies:

contusions of left-over light. 

Cori A. Winrock’s poems have appeared in (or are waiting in the wings of) Black Warrior Review,  Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Barn Owl Review, Pool & others. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Individual Artist Grant as well as being chosen as Editor’s Choice for Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award. Her manuscript was a finalist for the 2010 Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award.

December 12th: Sarah Rosenthal

from Lizard

She has landed.

She’s in the seat

of bite. She’s

dreaming tails and

thunder. Sound is

what binds her.

Inscrutable, she

whispers, why

would I want that

word? Blues hard

enough, she croons.

All night trades

appetites, all day

seeks cover. Drinks

in the happy hour

Sarah Rosenthal is the editor of A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive) and author of ManhattenHow I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin), sitings (a+bend), and not-chicago (Melodeon Poetry Systems). She is the recipient of the Leo Litwak Fiction Award and grant-supported writing residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, and Ragdale. An Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts, she has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University and Santa Clara University as well as privately, and writes curricula for the Developmental Studies Center.

December 11th: Deborah Poe

Death and the Woman (Tod und Frau)

object exactly the size of any space
we occupy, shadowed against
a shadow as it is. if this is
to be being and to be being
in it irremediably without
refuse materiality how
do we remain silent, left
for deaf, how do we occupy
silence, how do we leave, do we

             -Jen Hofer, from One

muscle, bones, sinew—back’s arch leg’s fierce tendons

toes grounded behind the body—first figure, Mother—

as if to reject apparition or sprint, knee

lunged forward

skeleton—mocking monster

leg bone defies the lurch

arms bound behind by scaffolding

costas stacked upon skinless figure

second leg arrests Mother’s pitch

head reared back, the abnormal stretch

neck bared to the inevitable

child you climb a desperate branch—torso
of the body—hands reach above breasts

this gaze’s impossibility

shadow of three bodies, one violent mass—

your small right foot in the resilient light

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010) and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008). Deborah’s writing is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Fact-Simile Magazine, Peaches & Bats, Jacket, Sidebrow and Colorado Review. Deborah Poe is fiction editor of Drunken Boat and guest curator of Trickhouse’s “Experiment" door 2010/2011. For more information, visit www.deborahpoe.com. 

December 10th: Susan Briante

DECEMBER POEM

      for Farid

You post
a link
to a love song
on my wall
I tell you
to wear
a coat
it’s cold
it’s months
since we’ve stood
at a baggage
carousel
O brave
new country
of short days
this year
I just want
to love
each other
kind
let each
day stand
before
our red door
like David Rawlings
singing the part
of Emmylou Harris
singing the part
of Alison Krauss
we will work
something out
in our own voice.

Susan Briante is the author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press, 2007) and Utopia Minus (Ahsahta Press, 2011). Lately, she can be found translating the work of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio as well as writing poems about the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Briante is an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. She lives in Dallas with the poet Farid Matuk and their daughter.

December 9th: Julie Strand

Alien

Where is the horsebed, the mall square, the sea length equator? 
What words are without eyes?
 
Without clothes she landed.
Maze legs longer, the people mistake
her for a doorframe. Walk through and things
are cloudy. Sense no longer alive. Squint to see
all the better to hear, a language of audience and skies.

Things here taste weird, they mace weird, lace up the face weird. 
They guess a mask or shoe?

Ears stare, hands feel to learn of the what.
Lost and loud, the mouths yell out, 
What are you? Smoke and mirrors and legs
that hide eyes. Words wrap maleus in the pinna
the people listen for light and sight. The alien
she has all the eyes.

From 2004-2010, Julie Strand served as the Education Coordinator at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, WI. Currently, she's in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Boise State University and works at The Log Cabin Literary Center. Julie is the author of The Mae West Defense, (Dancing Girl Press, 2009). Her poetry has appeared in Caffeine Destiny, FOURSQUARE Editions, Wicked Alice, Arsenic Lobster, WOMB Poetry, Boo: A Journal of Terrific Things, Weave Magazine and others.

December 8th: Jen Tynes

RABBIT FEVER

Adults in early winter love

                                 climbing toward open skin, walking in

 the center of trails where weeds do not

                                 brush against them. Burning it

with a match. The next best things

                                 to wide masking tape are the eyes

and hands of small children. Myself, I feel

                                 black as the head of a pin. You may want

to put this in a jar of rubbing alcohol

                                 permanently marked with the date

and location. You may want to mouth

                                 like a tiny barb, use petroleum

jelly or nail polish. I have displayed

                                 the ruffle of your waist band

marks like a bird that eats all

                                 the gardenias. I have rivered off

the yard dust with a half-frozen

                                 coil before we close in

on the evening.

Jen Tynes lives in Denver and edits horse less press. She is Reviews and Interviews Editor for Denver Quarterly. Most recently she is the author of Heron/Girlfriend (Coconut Books). A chapbook collaboration with Mike Sikkema, Autogeography, is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review.