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Gillian Conoley
The burnt tropic    masticating its vine stock    wand and wind—

Cracked I-phone glass  :  raying thought, chatter  :  susurration and aftershock

hair matted    below our ears receiving signals // not all that    synthesizable—


rhythm and phoneme    saying hey there,    hey there


           [until more gessoed grew    the honeydark summer street—




when you]    coming back—

                  sang—

                                                     the heat    —fecund—    nightfallen



Partial to sky—tadpoles gone celestial—

Our vocabulary split


into two columns in which :    a lexicon likes beginning    —carrion, nightingale—

cloud bank and snow—    A waitress slept in her car for the heat

breathing in    the half-inch of the window    left open
from the book NOTES FROM THE PASSENGER / Nightboat Books
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I like when poems teach me things about their own composition. This one wanted to flip itself. Originally “Partial to sky––tadpoles . . .“ was first line with the four subsequent lines at the beginning. The waitress especially wanted to be at the end, at the car window, breathing, a bit of hope. Then the punctuation wanted to help the poem sing its own song in the repeopled metropole.

Gillian Conoley on "A metropole that unpeoples and peoples"
"The quintessential California bookseller behind City Lights gets his moment"

"This fall, for all his achievements in championing books and reading, Yamazaki will receive the prestigious Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, presented annually by the National Book Foundation."

via LOS ANGELES TIMES
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Brandon Shimoda's Hydra Medua
What Sparks Poetry:
Brandon Shimoda on Other Arts

"Dot and I were sleeping on the floor. Yumi was in the other room. It was raining and windy. We hung a furin, a Japanese wind bell, above our front porch, and it was ringing loudly, sweetly. It kept me awake, in a good way. I was content to just listen, then lines of poetry, unremarkable but quietly unrelenting, came to mind."
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