Ocean, every so often, a kitchen tile or child's toy
rises from you, years after the hurricane's passed.

This time, the disaster was somewhere else.
The disaster was always somewhere else, until it wasn't.

Punctuation of the morning after: comma between
red sky and sailors' warning, white space where a storm cloud lowers.

Where the bay breaks away, the sentence ends: a waning
crescent of peninsula, barely visible

but for the broken buildings, the ambulance lights.
Ocean, even now, even shaken, you hold the memory

of words, of worlds that failed slowly, then all at once.
A flotilla of gulls falls onto you, mourners draped in slate.
from the book GIVEN / Autumn House Press
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This poem came out of the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. Years later, objects lost in the storm continued to wash up on the beach. The ocean remembers, even after the news cycle has moved on.

Liza Katz Duncan on "Apostrophe"
Cover image of Lauren CAmp's book, An Eye in Each Square
"No Meaning, No Matter, No More"

"The artist Agnes Martin slips in and out of Lauren Camp’s An Eye in Each Square like a wraith, an invisible companion. 'Must Learn Neither' introduces the book’s tripartite structure and its obsessions: 'What I want / is nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more.' Like Martin’s art, Camp’s is private and oblique, not confessional. The poet observes how the artist’s work 'made / sacred an emptiness,' and if the poems are ekphrastic, they are also an invocation, a conversation."

viaRAIN TAXI
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Cover image of Evie Shockley's book, Suddenly We
What Sparks Poetry:
Evie Shockley on Language as Form


"I found this truism (which seems to readily reproduce itself: 'one sin begets another,' 'one tragedy begets another,' 'one wedding begets another') bubbling up in my brain. If only one vote begat another in that inevitable way, I sighed, thinking of how hard it was to get women’s right to vote established as the law of the land—and of how long it was after that before Black women were able to exercise their 'women’s rights.'"
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