Category Archives: poem

“Love Poem” by Richard Taylor

I am your postage stamp—
licked, applied to paper,
cancelled, sent far away.
Feel my serrated edges.

-Richard Taylor
Fading into Bolivia
Accents Publishing

Richard Taylor is a professor of English and currently serves as Kenan Visiting Writer at Transylvania University. A former Kentucky poet laureate, he is the author of six collections of poetry, two novels, and several books of non-fiction, mostly relating to Kentucky history. A former dean and teacher in the Governor’s Scholars Program, he was selected as Distinguished Professor at Kentucky State University in 1992. He has won two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Al Smith Creative Writing Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. He and his wife Lizz own Poor Richard’s Books in Frankfort, Kentucky.

“Spring Storm” by Greg Pape

13 Replies

A pause in the light,
in birdsong.
The weightless end
of an hour falls.
A storm blows in
over the Bitterroots.
Wind pushes flurries
into the silvery valley light,
finding voice in bare limbs
of cottonwoods, already budding,
waving, humming low notes
under the green brushes of pines.
All down the valley
doors are closing.
All down the valley horses
are turning east
as a backlit curtain of snow
closes on the southern vista.
One gray and black
bearpaw appaloosa
on a fenced half acre
runs tight circles in the dirt,
throwing its head, shaking its mane,
rocking forward, cocking
its spotted haunches,
kicking the teeth out of the wind.

–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.

“Gruff Passage” by Thom Ward

9 Replies

Winter won’t give itself over to spring. She said,
If you start out depressed, everything else is a bonus.
Each morning I piss excellence, was his response.
If we’re lucky, notes trudge out to us, and sometimes
we start singing upside down. Invisible trolls
smash old radiator pipes with their invisible hammers.
Hello to the firelight in scotch, goodbye to the smoke
in whiskey. Is that a sudden rush of comfort? Or just
another guy playing catch-and-release consumer?
The couch in my shrink’s office continues to bet against
me, and the bank plans to mortgage my shadow.
Travel Sunday morning in Saturday’s shoes: recall
how the weight of that leather will outlast us, except
for those embarrassments our children agreed to forgive.

–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.

“No Sapling Love” by Mary E. O’Dell

200 Replies

We are two old oaks
rooted each in our patch of earth
leaning together
crowns near enough
for the sparrows to flit
through our mingled branches.

–Mary E. O’Dell,
Bigger Then They Appear
(Accents Publishing)

Mary E. O’Dell is founder and president of Green River Writers, Inc. and has published several poetry collections. Her first novel, The Sweet Letting Go, was published by Turquoise Morning Press.

“Before the Outing” by Roberta Beary

215 Replies

my son’s boyfriend
three words i practice saying
alone in my room

rainbow flag
father pretends
not to see

iii

not something
that’s contagious
still you step back
from my son
and his boyfriend

rainbow flag
mother tiptoes around
the subject

with knife in hand
my son’s lover dissects
the last white peach

–Roberta Beary,
Deflection
(Accents Publishing)

Roberta Beary is the haibun editor of Modern Haiku; she tweets her photoku @shortpoemz. Her book The Unworn Necklace was named a William Carlos Williams finalist by the Poetry Society of America in 2008, the first such honor for a book of haiku. A frequent judge of haiku and haibun contests, she travels worldwide to give workshops on the art of the short poem. Her poetry is featured in the reference work A Companion to Poetic Genre (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and in the anthologyHaiku In English The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013). www.robertabeary.com.

“IV” by Frederick Smock

13 Replies

Pigeons, their wings clasped
behind them, pace to and fro
on the window-ledge, darkly
muttering to themselves

about what we cannot know.
Even here, on the top floor
of a downtown Vancouver hotel,
with a lovely view of the harbor,

the boat-house in Stanley Park
and snow-capped mountains,
the pigeons pace up and down
in the green gathering dusk,

muttering to the gargoyles
who grin and, darkly, agree.

–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.

“Recommendation to God” by Bina Kals

2 Replies

Poet Dennis Preston reads “Recommendation to God” by Bina Kals. This poem was translated from the original Bulgarian by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer.

The videos in this series come from the North American Premiere of The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry at the Morris book shop.

“Recollection Rate” by Jude Lally

1 Reply

Ideas blow in rapidly
like cold fronts
on chilly autumn afternoons

Without the capability
to write
I seek means
to salvage dreams

Must be a way to get
them down before I forget;
maybe keep a tape recorder
by the bed

or rush to the computer
where the whole voluble world
awaits?

Which do I foster
and which surrender
to the subconscious?

10% make it to the hard drive—
the syntax casualties are enormous

–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.

“Bipolar” by Andrew Merton

1 Reply

The crows are elsewhere today.

Shovel the coal from your eyelids.

Empty the wheelbarrow of your mind.

Regurgitate a circus.

Indulge your clamoring toes.

Shake out your sheets until all the potatoes are gone.

Make love to an iris, a pansy, a rose.

Discover the constellation Platypus.

Hurry. The crows are never gone for long.

–Andrew Merton,
Evidence that We Are Descended from Chairs
Accents Publishing

Andrew Merton has been a political reporter and columnist for the Gloucester (Massachusetts) Times, The Boston Herald Traveler and the Boston Globe, and a contributing editor with Boston Magazine. His articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Ms. Magazine, Yankee Magazine and The Boston Phoenix. His book Enemies of Choice was published by Beacon Press in 1980, and his anthology In Your Own Voice: A Writer’s Reader was published by Harper Collins in 1995. His poetry has appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Powhatan Review, Paper Street, The Comstock Review, Silk Road, Third Wednesday, The American Journal of Nursing and elsewhere. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire.

“A Dream About the Wall and the Key” by Nikolay Boykov

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