Tuesday poem #557 : Barbara Tomash : I Ask My Arm [Not to Exist]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barbara Tomash is the author of five books of poetry including, most recently, Her Scant State (Apogee) and PRE- (Black Radish); and two chapbooks Of Residue (Drop Leaf Press), and A Woman Reflected (palabrosa). Her writing has been a finalist for The Dorset Prize, the Colorado Prize, The Test Site Poetry Prize, and the Black Box Poetry Prize. Before her creative interests turned her toward writing she worked extensively as a multimedia artist. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, New American Writing, Verse, Posit, Tupelo Quarterly, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #556 : Constance Hansen : Motherless at Thirteen

 

 

My body begins to curve
into a question mark.

 

 

 

 

Constance Hansen is Managing Editor of Poetry Northwest. Her poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in: RHINO, Harvard Review Online, Southern Humanities Review, Cimarron Review, Four Way Review, Northwest Review, Vallum, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she lives in Paris. You may learn more at www.constancehansen.com.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

 

Tuesday poem #555 : Lydia Unsworth : Featherlight

 

One by one, the houses are run down. Link-style maisonettes with their bellies sliced out. While I remain the same, dated as interior design, open to visitors, like a fine example, shackled in glass, of a postwar estate. I was meant to live like this, small, nurtured. Hanging gardens, oval Bonsai dishes, we were two and the same. Can anyone else see these streets, their buried gods, the blood from our shins like shadows in gravel, these graves? Private housing associations bleach our village greens as I photograph this new undoing.

 

 

 

 

 

Lydia Unsworth’s latest collections are Arthropod (Death of Workers) and Mortar (Osmosis). Pamphlets include Residue (above/ground), cement, terraces (Red Ceilings), and YIELD (KFS). Poems in places like Ambit, Banshee, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold, Oxford Poetry, PERVERSE, and Shearsman. This poem is from These Steady Bulbs, forthcoming in January with above/ground press.

Photo credit: Liza Stokport

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan