Category Archives: poem

“Wading In” by Nana Lampton

Next to nothing to enter the stream.
A light rod, waders against the cold,
a sense of how the salmon lie –
behind the rock in lesser current.
More than anything that weighs,
it’s the willingness to be half in darkness.
The feel of boot on rock is the way to see
below the surface.

I cross the river,
staff thrust downstream to prop my steps
against the current. At last
I stand firmly, to cast
where dark ripples meet lighter ones.

All that departs my sheathed self is filament with fly
patiently tied for dropping in
the river in disguise.
The rod no longer measures time or space.
It’s all in the meeting of stream currents.

Atlantic salmon, heavy with its ocean feed,
about to fast a year on its way up river,
waits for rain to fill its pool
before leaping to the next one.

The catch:
the long reeling
of this golden silver light moving in scales
formed as much by mind as water.

–Nana Lampton,
Bloom on a Split Board
Accents Publishing

Nana Lampton earned a BA in English literature at Wellesley, and an MA at the University of Virginia, and she attended programs at the Harvard Business School. In 2004, she received an MFA in Writing from Spalding University. Nana has also studied drawing and painting at the Corcoran School of Art and the Louisville Visual Art Association. Nana’s other publications include the books Snowy Owl Gathers in Her Trove, and Moon with the Sun in Her Eye. Her art and poetry have been exhibited at the Chapman Friedman Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Northwoods Gallery in Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin, among others.

“Orfeu Negro” by Bianca Spriggs

22 Replies

Orpheus returns
from the Hades Carnival
alone and empty-handed,
only to spend another life cycle
below ground seeking an entry
to the underworld and for his beloved’s
satyr-harried specter drifting always
beyond his reach.

He wanders, his acoustic alive
in his hands; he strums and tongues
the type of love that would raise the dead,
were their ears not stoppered
by the droning of their own regrets.

Orpheus would die if he could
in this unending sepulcher.
He floats on his back in the watery ether
of the Acheron, alongside bouquets
of Persephonean black orchids
waiting for destiny’s lottery to select
him again for some new light.

Again, he endures a womb,
a soaked and traumatic birth,
suckling and swaddled at the brown,
freckled breast of a woman
who has never heard of Hades.

Orpheus is reborn and reborn
and reborn, until the name Eurydice
becomes merely another lyric in his song.

-Bianca Spriggs,
How Swallowtails Become Dragons
(Accents Publishing)

Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow Bianca Spriggs is a freelance instructor of composition, literature, and creative writing. She holds degrees fromTransylvania University and the University of Wisconsin. She is a Kentucky Humanities Council Lecturer and the creator and programmer of the Wild Women of Poetry Slam (formerly the Gypsy Poetry Slam) featured annually at theKentucky Women Writers Conference. Heralded as “the new standard bearer for the Affrilachian Poets” by founding member Frank X Walker, Bianca is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications) and her work may also be found in the anthologies New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings and America! What’s My Name? and the journals Union Station Magazine, Appalachian Heritage Magazine, and others.

“On Purpose” by Bobby Steve Baker

17 Replies

Distant, growling, thunder woke me
from the sleep of nothingness.
A man was staring out the bay window
into the glimmering lightning.
His back was faintly red
in the light of the digital alarm,
3:30 am. I am not dreaming.
He stands and turns to look at me.
I am naked on my bed. He has
a mask over his face –
the hyperbolic smile from old theater.

He tells me he is here
to replace the owl who ate the lice.
You mean mice.
No, lice,
the lice of your poison dreams.
I don’t dream.
No, you don’t, not anymore, that is my job,
my day job actually.
Really I’m a musician.

The man is well dressed:
black linen suit, white shirt, red tie.
I go to him and touch his hand.
It is sand. I unbutton his shirt.
He is made of the wet warm sand
of my childhood.
I ask him what he has done with the owl.
I am also the owl, he tells me,
but he does not look like the owl.

I think I know you,
I think you are here on purpose.
Yes, he answers.
I am on purpose. The owl was by accident.
He let you dream,
which led to the great sadness.

I stick my finger deep into his sand chest.
I feel the warmth of my childhood
flow up my arm, days at the beach.
He takes away the mask,
showing the back of his head.
He walks away.

I lie down on the bed
and contemplate the great sadness.
The day I lost my identity,
the honor I worked for.
I always thought it was greed
or bad judgment.
The psychiatrist said
wrong place, wrong time.
Could it really have been caused by dreaming?
I fell back into the deep sleep
of nothingness.

–Bobby Steve Baker,
Numbered Bones
Accents Publishing

Bobby Steve Baker was born in Ontario, Canada in 1951, but has lived and practiced cosmetic surgery in Lexington, Kentucky for many years. He holds an MFA degree in Poetry from National University and has published in various literary journals, including Ann Arbor Review, Boston Literary Magazine, and Grey Sparrow Journal. In 2009, his poetry in tinfoildresses was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Bobby grew up in a home where poetry was ever-present but began to write seriously only in the past few years.

“Digitation Blues” by Richard Taylor

“Flamingo” by Richard Schiffman

3 Replies

Pretty flamingo
in a pink spandex pants suit
perched upon a twiggy leg,
cradling a cell phone
in Grand Central.
As commuters pour
like Mongol hordes,
she tucks her head
beneath a wing
for better reception.

–Richard Schiffman,
Bigger Than They Appear
(Accents Publishing)

Richard Schiffman is a poet and author of two biographies. His “Spiritual Poetry Portal” can be found at multiplex.isdna.org/poetry.htm.

“Two Encounters” by Greg Pape

169 Replies

I. Buffalo Trace

Stars glitter across black pastures,
gleam and shine in the eyes of buffalo.
How many stars ride the dark dome
of a buffalo’s eye? How many
buffalo breathe the scents of grass
and river mist, starlight glinting
in the frost on their dense curled coats,
on flecks of mica riding their hooves
as they move in clans and gather
along the trace that leads to the shoals
and shallows of the crossing? Is the river
of the milky way their map? What
calls them? Why, when they come
to the two canoes by the river,
do they jump over the first where a man
sleeps, and smash the second
with their hooves until it splinters
and bloodies the fore bones of their legs?
Why do they spare him?

II. Bird in the Hand

Cold still sunlit hour, December
in the Bitterroot. The sun was about
to let the Bitterroots rise up in front of it,
the moon was rising over Kentucky,
shining on the river where the Buffalo
used to cross, easing up the east slopes
of the Sapphires. Chickadees flew
back and forth from the apple tree
to the feeder, picking up sunflower seeds.
One flitted across my head twice,
thanking me, maybe, for filling the feeder.
Up in the bare branches the birds
picked open the seeds. One chickadee
was looking at me. I made my chickadee
sound, took a handful of seeds from the bucket
and held out my open palm flat and still.
The bird landed on my middle fingertips.

I felt the delicate cleaving of its small
clawed feet. It looked into my eyes,
hopped into my palm and took a single seed
then flew back to a branch in the apple tree.
Ah, Chickadee, now that was something.

–Greg Pape,
Animal Time
Accents Publishing

Greg Pape is the author of nine books, including Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern (University of Pittsburgh Press), Sunflower Facing the Sun, winner of the Edwin Ford Piper Prize (University of Iowa Press), and American Flamingo, winner of a Crab Orchard Open Competition Award (Southern Illinois University Press). His poems have been published widely in such magazines and literary reviews as The Atlantic, Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Northwest Review, and Poetry. He has received the Discovery/The Nation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, and his poems have been featured on NPR and read by Garrison Keillor on The Writers’ Almanac. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University. Greg served as Poet Laureate of Montana from 2007 to 2009.

“Petites Dents, Petites Pattes” by Thom Ward

255 Replies

The language has always been smarter than us.
It slinks, pounces on invisible mice. Waits
by the bowl just recently filled, looks up
and stares through you—its tail curling
into a question mark. Each moment
another chance to nap, for it to assume
what it rests upon. Or so you think. And
who can think beyond the language?
Who doesn’t yearn to say—cat—without
the cat itself? Go ahead, keep collecting
those pieces of yarn, rubber-squeak toys,
keep changing that litter box. No doubt,
your god is a stranger. How quickly
cat disappears when the stranger arrives.

–Thom Ward,
Etcetera’s Mistress
Accents Publishing

Thom Ward is sole proprietor of Thom Ward’s Poetry Editing and Proofreading Services. Ward’s poetry collections include Small Boat with Oars of Different Size (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000) and Various Orbits (Carnegie Mellon, 2004). Ward’s poetry chapbook, Tumblekid, winner of the 1998 Devil’s Millhopper poetry contest, was published by the University of South Carolina-Aiken in 2000. His collection of prose poems, The Matter of the Casket, was published by CustomWords in 2007. Ward teaches creative writing workshops at high schools and colleges around the country, tutors individual poetry students, and edits poetry manuscripts. He is a faculty and advisory board member at Wilkes University’s Graduate Creative Writing program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Thom Ward lives in western New York with his girlfriend Jennifer and their cat Phantom.

“V” by Frederick Smock

18 Replies

The geese have returned again to campus,
to the roof of the library where they make their nest,
where they can look out over Beargrass Creek
and the elms of Creason Park.

What we do here is of no importance to them,
except perhaps when we exclaim over them
when they deign to stroll among us,
for they have always known what they need to know.

They stroll among us like foreign royalty.
We approach them as supplicants, small offerings
in our hands, and come away marveling.
Then, we return to our studies of theoretical things.

–Frederick Smock,
The Deer at Gethsemani: Eclogues
Accents Publishing

Frederick Smock is associate professor of English at Bellarmine University, where he received the 2005 Wyatt Faculty Award. He has published four previous collections of poems with Larkspur Press. He is also the author of Craft-talk: On Writing Poems, and Pax Intrantibus: A Meditation on the Poetry of Thomas Merton. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, The Louisville Review, The Merton Journal (UK), Poetry East, Trajectory, and other journals.

“Work Perks” by Jude Lally

1 Reply

Rushing to the bathroom
. my only focus: RELIEF.
Without taking aim
. I pelt an empty, upside-down beer can
. . with my clear, fierce stream.
The tin rattles back the sound of rainfall
. and clogs the hole in the bowl
. causing the toilet to overflow.

Later I go in
. and see the blockage gone.
I can’t help but wonder
. how much the bar staff
. makes here?

–Jude Lally,
I’m Fine but Thanks for Asking
Accents Publishing

Jude Lally writes and recites poetry as an outlet for his creative needs and as a means of enlightening, inspiring, engaging and entertaining listeners. Fortunately, Jude’s main source of inspiration in his writing is easily accessible; unfortunately, so many places in the world are not: in 1998 Jude was diagnosed with a rare, degenerative neuromuscular disease called Friedrich’s Ataxia. Jude received a BA in Business Administration in May of 2006. Jude is a member of the poetry group Poezia, occasionally attends The Poet’s Supper and the Artcroft writer’s group outside of Carlisle, KY, and is a regular presenter at the Holler Poets series events.

“Badger Eats” by Adam Day

224 Replies

Here is Badger in a small room,
knotted nipples among a bed
of gray hair, the mud-caked
knuckles, gristle-mouthed
with a vole carcass, the moss-scummed
walls, the cellar door’s rusted
padlock, the wheeze of pulleys
outside, geese barking and dark
water under a shelf of snow.

–Adam Day,
Bigger Than They Appear
(Accents Publishing)

Adam Day is the recipient of a 2010 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha.

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