To P. Are words partners in crime with life? A heated argument going on, While the rough wild sea can’t wait For souls to dive in and on no accounts Can flowers rise- No funny ghosts, but real wrath and hunger If over here, away to the left, In the lane alongside your fields, Maudlin ballads or garish sunsets keep shouting At full blast that life is wonderful, the trick of blue gamblers- But hush now, look, hope and desire …
Tag: National Poetry Month
“Petri Dish Emotions” & “Eating Emotions” * Art & Poetry * Janina Aza Karpinska
Note from the author to the editor: I had in mind that I might send you “Eating Emotions,” originally published in Magma 85—a schools edition, but reworked since looking at it again. This morning when I lifted my head I noticed a piece of artwork I’d made, Petri Dish Emotions, that held my eye in a way that only made sense later in the day when I saw a short video clip of a TED talk by Brené Brown and …
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Sillage 4: Fille en Aiguilles * Poem + Essay * Jehanne Dubrow
Aromatica Poetica is delighted to present the fourth in the Sillage series by Jehanne Dubrow. She is the author of several books of poetry and prose that dance with our heart’s senses, including Taste: A Book of Small Bites, which we highly recommend! Each of the 12 poems are written in the voice of a specific perfume—this one is Fille en Aiguilles[i]—and were begun during the height of the pandemic. For this Sillage series, the poems are paired with a …
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“A Night Out at the Anosmia Restaurant” & Other Poems by Philip Raisor
A Night Out at the Anosmia[*] Restaurant I accepted the offer from the pale estuary of fingers pinched on two thin slices of jicama tapped lightly with lime and a weathered rim of sweet chili powder. “Gracias,” I said in my best Ricardo Montalbán lip-sink. Friday night at our favorite Mexican franchise. “Can you taste that at all?” she asked. I sucked and replied that even where math was the official language, I was a zero. “Can you even smell it?” I …
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“Yellow” * Prose Poem * Y. C. Lin
i. My mother knocks it against the counter and splits it cleanly in half. Yellow yolk slides smoothly into porcelain. She whisks the mixture, tilting the bowl. This way more air goes in, she shows me, arm moving swiftly back and forth. Yellow spills into the clear. The fork clacks rhythmically against the bowl while the oil in the pan sizzles on the stove. There is the loud, incessant noise of the ventilation hood, the rising smoke, the hazy heat, …
Five Visual Poems of Scent by J.I. Kleinberg
These visual poems by J.I. Kleinberg are from an ongoing series of collages (2000+) built from phrases created unintentionally through the accident of magazine page design. Each contiguous fragment of text (transcribed as a poetic line) is entirely removed from its original sense and syntax. The text is not altered (except for the occasional deletion of prefixes, suffixes, or punctuation) and includes no attributable phrases. The lines of each collage are, in most cases, sourced from different magazines. —About J.I. …
“April is the Cruellest Month…” * ‘The Wasteland’ (The Burial of the Dead) by T. S. Eliot
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. …
“Must” & Other Poems by Robert Beveridge
Must Juice is wrungfrom the grapeswith a wooden pressor, nicer, feet. This is donea few times, how manydepends on the grapes and what is left is must.Exhausted, pulpy,but, with essence given,imperative. The juice will,of course, make wine,ferment inside wetbarrels, gain potency. But the must, the structure,can lie on the tonguewithout change, slipdown into the throat,taste of sweetness,exhaustion. Oneiromancer You ask yourself for the hundredthtime how much fish sauce is toomuch, add it, throw in another twotablespoons for good …
Two Poems of Scented Place by Frances Daggar Roberts
En Auvergne We stooped to cross the threshold carrying evening on our shoulders and shadow curved the corners and the walls around a muted light. A simmering dark sauce breathed out a lure of something richly meat. We took our seats along a wooden bench quietly close as frogmouths. Knitted into family there we watched the sorcery of our hostess as she sliced the orange folds of mushroom into her steaming brew. A scatter of herbs unlike the ones we …
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