Four Contagious Poems by Tina Kelley

When I sit down to write poems, which isn't often enough, I like to prime the pump by reading poems that inspire me, that have playful rhythms that stick in my head like a songworm. I have a weakness for litanies, for the sound of ten thousand Walt Whitmans intertwining and yawping, not in unison.

Here are four of my favorites. I hope you like them!

Wheatlands by Judith Skillman from her upcoming book, The Never.

To travel is to dream of wheat,
passing over and under the drape
and pleat of hill and valley, darts taken in
when floodwaters passed over the earth.

To dream is to revel in scenery,
to be nourished by land -- its crop tarnished
by harvest, like the stubble on a man's face
that makes the face handsome to a woman.

To sleep is to travel inside the germ
and the chaff. To wake is to breathe
a fine dust rising, bedeviled.

To dream is to become the whirling dervish
stuck inside the gold hen --
that one -- who clucked at us
about hysteria until the day she died.

Our journey takes a year, a week, a day,
or an hour. Roads the color of wood smoke
cross fields. A water table lies thirty feet down,
under soil thicker than flourless cake.

In drought, dun-colored pyramids
grow from the mouths of machinery.
Sun beats down on the Palouse.

We come to savor this crop grown brighter
than noon, poorer than dusk.
A whole hell full of dollars gone blank as a page.

We comb the fields with our eyes,
picking out threads of silence,
choosing the nap and the grain.
Prefer gold, the land says, and we do.

Grace Isn't Always a Woman by Tiffany Midge

Grace is the quickening of rainstorms.
Grace is the mad blood of thunder.
Grace is the pulsing vein of air and wind.
Grace is the carving of midnight shadows.
Grace is the thin bones of winter trees.
Grace is the musical rattle of memory.
Grace is the alive current between us.

Grace isn't always a woman.

Grace is the snowy down of geese's wings.
Grace is the stir of velvet and cream lace.
Grace is the curtain of green pine and cedar.
Grace is the copper enamel of sundown.
Grace is the brilliant ribbon of desire.

Grace isn't always a woman.

Grace is the endless reservoir of dream.
Grace is the anatomy of silence.
Grace is the language of mute spirits speaking through us.

Grace isn't always a woman.

Grace is the echo of deep cliffs.
Grace is the dying embers of forests on fire
stealing the breath of stillborn rock.
Grace is the mutiny of reckless visions.
Grace is the motion of calm.
Grace is the ritual of prayer, the faces of nameless
saints and the throats of wounded animals.

Grace isn't always a woman.

Grace is the quiet habit of stone.
Grace is the loud voices of anxious water
flowing backward to the origin of all things.
Grace is the beginning of time.
Grace is the ending of time.
Grace is the timelessness.

Grace isn't always a woman.

Grace is the opening we enter,
the door we close behind.
Grace is the delicate impulse we share with those
like ourselves whose loins and hearts dance when they touch us.
Grace is the crimson of dawn.
Grace is the granite liquid of sky.

Grace isn't always a woman.

Grace is the invisible thread of common objects.
Grace is the redemption of transient souls.
Grace is the release of imprisoned spirit, the resurrection of faith
that stores beautiful gestures in boxes of freedom.

Grace isn't always a woman.

Grace is the name we sometimes call ourselves.
Grace is the name we sometimes call others.

Sometimes Grace isn't always a woman,

other times she is.

Intermediate by Tom Benediktsson

 

I ski blue trails, golf in the 90’s.

I play doubles on the C level.

I can do rough carpentry.

I can cook.

I’m pretty fair at Jeopardy.

I can talk to most people.

I have hiked a few hundred miles.

I have read a lot of books and written a couple.

I have ordered meals in languages I don’t otherwise understand.

I have been good at staying married.

I can play straight pool with my son.

I can tie my own flies.

I have taught for thirty years at the same second-rate state

university, where my greatest accomplishment may be

that one of my ex-students wrote me into her sit-com.

My poems are mostly out of print or unpublished.

In almost all of the rest of the vast world of human endeavor, I am a novice.

I suffer from indolence.

Sometimes I drink too much bourbon.

I have no religion.

I get mad at my computer.

I hate Republicans and dislike Democrats.

I am terrible with money.

I am frequently bored.

But if I can speak candidly and without false modesty,

            for what I have said here and what I have not, you know,

            I could envy me my own life.

I am one happy mediocre mother fucker.

Deniability, title poem of George Witte's second volume of poetry.

 

A leak implies without affirming fact;

there's wiggle room should details contradict,

events reverse themselves, a photograph

proved forged. Whose grasp of evidence is firm

enough to verify its chain, each link

umblemished by the bottom muck of time?

Consider your child's birth certificate,

Mom's recipes, amendments to your will--

if you've lost these then how's intelligence

know missile shed from shadow, extract sense

from cellphone intercepts where coded threat's

expressed as wedding plans? Network anchors

bargain ratings higher, negotiate

for access to exclusive video.

 

Officials fashion lullaby from lie,

commitment into exit strategy

conveyed in semaphore, averted eyes

a silent language undercutting words.

Truth's relative as beauty, circumstance

our ever-shifting standard, as an urn's

exhumed pastoral darkens to reveal

a priest receiving sacrificial girls

with oil and fire, their moistened limbs consigned

to greater good, the glaze that purifies.

You turn it, passerby, obliged to none,

witness without testimony, faint sough

of bone and ash inside this artifact

the only evidence you can't deny.