Smelting into their third year, Blast Furnace Press(edited by R.Clever) released another issue this week, featuring a selection of works which serenade, ponder, and supplicate to the reader. It is my pleasure to have featured with an audio recording of myself, reading three of my poems.
Gathered around a thoughtful theme this quarter, Odes, Meditations and Prayers strikes me as especially reflective and filled with longing. Carolyne Whelen’s influence might be subtly felt in the choice of this issue’s poems?
It would be wrong to single out any poem as an overall best, in an issue whose collected pieces are so welded to one another, but I did enjoy Brionne Janae Thompson’s Nightmares, for the manner with which two liquid streams pour in parallel past one another, both as a cry for deliverance from crisis and, at once, the considered contrast of deep and rational thought. The piece seems to encapsulate exactly what this issue stands toward.
As it is a spoken word contribution I made, I would like to produce the text below, for the reference of listeners and readers. But, please, head over to the journal website to experience the whole, for yourselves.
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At Break Point
i)Suck rock, sea, and swallow; another flung, my brother's arm, another follows. We chuck flint-rock and fuck-yous as the sobbing surf accepts each blow without a bruise.
ii)
Sap stalks, trees of willow, bluster-bent and gust-crushed, hacking billows - lips whip: voices racking stems with drear lust; each then snapping back despite a lack of an apology from us.
The Use of Me
Turn me in with turning leaves, with squirrels, tend me seldom as some feral plot. Watch me like a model in my polka dot apparel, let me be my foibles and my fops.Place me in among the lathes and potters wheels, plant me with the sycamores and rings of yew. Use me for that certain task like proper tools, love me when I waiver, spin or skew.
Counsel of Alders
And now I go, to learn what Alders show in red coronas, by their tack-black skin, through diagrams which ink December blues: dissected hearts, unfolding into parts.Transmitted on a frosted tint as stillness, turned to sign - no matter when we listen in - one thing is meant: to cease, begin, reside, are of a kind. So, glimpse
me there, with my bisected limbs, unfolded ventricles, dark catkins to the winter rays, and all I hold within arrayed in wind.
