To the Lot of You,
It has come to my attention that you desire that I explain, no, defend myself. I, the daughter of the multi-billion elite, found to be partying, sexing, drugging, and doing all manner of things many of you do without the same level of scrutiny. While normally I would tell you outright to go f*^! yourselves, an event occurred in my life yesterday that I deem worthy of international pop culture awareness. Hence my decision to post this publicly on your celebrity “news” website.
In high school, my parents hired a boy of 21 just beginning college to tutor me. In his presence, I did most of those things you accused me of then—I paraded around in my bath towel, played with the bits of hair that extended to his cheek, and attempted every manner of seduction.… ...continue reading
It starts like threading yarn in a needle threading the vein
turning red pulling vocal cord blood and muscle
the things that grow in you like algae
blooming on a lake as blue as agate or turquoise—
do you want to be that lake? Maybe the granite beneath
it? The pull of iron the streams turning to rust?
You become flotsam on the shore:
driftwood pine needles blush herb and sunrise gore… ...continue reading
I wrap them like fine china in layers
of old newspapers and bubble wrap
andstill I know that the moving man
will drop the box or hit a pothole
on that bad stretch of road heading
out of town and something will crack.
All spring I have watched song
sparrows readying their nest in the rotting
crotch of a birch tree, laying in twigs
and leaves and feathers, lacing it up
withstring pulled from the canvas
deck chairs, only to have the arborist… ...continue reading
More than a stirring, more than a rag soaked in gasoline, these nights in the streets are about need.
It all gets televised, and television is about something else: a box or a flattened box, a profound stillness masquerading as movement.
No Future becomes a slogan, and then we move on. We live the No.
A billion smaller boxes. Little coffins for ideas.
There’ll be time enough for mindlessness. A spoon and a melting lawn gnome.
I want to inject my cell phone. Smart drugs. Traffic cones. Dunce caps. Safety orange. Blaze orange.
We gorge on that which muddies up the blood.
– Glen Armstrong… ...continue reading
I expected to return and find the house
collapsed on itself in my absence.
But I came back,
half as beaten down as before but still unwhole,
and found nothing changed,
all the way down to the dust bunnies
in the corner of the stairs.
I spent days and weeks before this one bracing myself,
building up my walls
where they had started to crumble away.
I placed a bucket in my hand
to bail myself back into the hole
I thought I created in my hurried exit
but found no such thing.
Nothing could have prepared me
for the amount of inaction needed.
I had prepared a grand re-opening.
and no one came.
I’ve never been good at adjusting
and readjusting,
the arranging
and rearranging.… ...continue reading
We drove past each other weekday mornings out where the highway is two lanes. It took him a month to notice. The third time he saw me, he smiled and waved. I waved back. I remembered to smile the next day.
I talked to him as we passed. About work. About downsizing. I explained how, if the same thing happened to him, he could transcribe medical reports over the Internet to make a living. I justified money spent for online games, online movies, online sex, food deliveries, wine deliveries, toilet paper deliveries.
I don’t know where I was going the first time I saw him. His head was tilted to one side and long brown hair covered half his face. He looked at me and it felt like I knew him.… ...continue reading
A leading American poet and a multiple Pushcart nominee (with awards from Midwest Poetry Review, Peninsula Pulse, Poetswest, Womanspace, and others), Midwest writer Christine Swanberg just had her ninth poetry collection, Wild Fruition: Sonnets, Spells, and Other Incantations, published. A college and high school teacher, she is a featured national reader and workshop leader; her work has appeared in hundreds of anthologies and journals.
Your collection of 75 poems is grouped into five parts, each preceded with a color or b/w photo. How long did it take to complete? Was it more challenging than your previous collection, The Alleluia Tree?
It has been five years since my last collection. I experimented with sonnets and shaping free verse. Part of my process is placing the poems in journals before publishing them as a collection because I want them to have wide a readership; it makes the collection more professional and more publishable.… ...continue reading