David Mills

(Tuskegee Airman Harry Stewart, Jr. training with the North American Aviation AT-6)
This was look right/fly right honesty. man-
ipulated honesty; unwanted instrument

honesty; wanton honesty; this was
churning, idiosyncratic honesty;

ornery honesty at attention. smack-
dab honesty—the kind that could

make you or made you or break you
and braid you; this was quicksilver

unwavering honesty, cockpit honest,
alluring wing-witty fuselage truth.

Personality type-A (for air) honesty.
The heavenly threshold of honesty; buck-

toothed honesty; this was unmonitored goggle
honesty; this was more honesty than honesty

could handle. This was honest to goodness and
honest to badness. This was some cool down Papa

honesty. Lone Star North Star honesty. Straighten
up and fly right honesty. This was cylinder after

cylinder of honesty. (Nine to be exact.) This was
horse-powered honesty, advanced and intermediate

honesty. air-cooled peculiar honesty. This
was controlled honesty on the Ides of March.

This was open wide and say ahhhh-
nesty.  Honestly.
from the journal EVERGREEN REVIEW
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Harry Stewart was part of the first African-American military pilots, the World War II Tuskegee Airmen. One of the planes Stewart trained with in Alabama was the AT-6 Texan—dubbed an “honest airplane” and the “Pilot Maker.” That “personality” adjective “honest” sent me on a lexical adventure where I employed epistrophe to create an energetic, coded catalogue poem that touches on some of the plane and Stewart’s backstory.
Informal color headshot of John Freeman and a dog
"Short Conversations with Poets: John Freeman"
 
"Solitude is a necessary oxygen for me. I need it to read, to think, to experience the quieter trance states that sustain me: being outdoors, disappearing into a book, daydreaming. Out of solitude I often return clarified by how I belong, or I wish to connect—to people, a larger group, a place. I can see the forest from above, or the city lights twinkling, metaphorically, and think, ah, I belong there."

via MCSWEENEY'S
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Cover image of Allison Cobb's book, After We All Died
What Sparks Poetry:
Allison Cobb on "For love"

"As a writer, I have been obsessed with the complexities of my origins, having been born and raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the town that built the first atomic bombs, and which remains the location of one of the nation’s three main nuclear weapons labs. Planetary legacies of damage and death stem from this place. How did this happen?"
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