Cate Marvin
The night classes pour into asphalt lots
that soon empty of their engines,
the students seeming to dissolve like raindrops,
the students seeming now to have been a hallucination

that buzzed angrily for hours beneath fluorescent lit
ceilings at poems like hands that refused to be held
or glittered their eyes at the kisses placed by
poems on their palms, longing for the vantage

of multiple choice answers over these overtures
of beauty and malignance. And the question
not just once but again, again, What is it?
They are all gone, the poems and their students,

have left me to wander into this mist settling
across the soft lawns this nether time of night,
to walk solitary toward my car's lone smudge beneath
the morose lumens cast from corners of campus

that have at them stationed lighted poles that
glow a chlorine blue, designated lightning rods for fear,
bedecked with alarm buttons to run to for
pressing, to send sirens out to saviors.

When did these lighted poles appear, their beacons
utterly unreachable? Even spied from behind
the windshield, one apprehends a great distance
between their stars and the bus stop's canopy,

beneath which hooded students smoke only
to disappear into the damp exhaustion of the night.
Which is always when the deer appear, ornament
themselves upon the lawns, frozen in mist, 

taking on the stance of the startled, now startlingly
pale, the four before me equidistant, and one
tipping the pitcher of her head as if to pour the grass
a drink or, considered upside down, suckle the milk

from soil or nurse the grass's dew. My bag of books
thrown over my back like a bag of bones, my bag
of poems a bag of stones, crushes my shoulder
as I wade in mist toward the car, and the deer,

who watch me as I watch them, seem a dream's
decision to find me far outside the room I sleep in.
They are an astonishment I do not wish to analyze.
And I am certain if I move too quickly they will, spooked,

run from me, or I am scared that if I do not run from them
they will stampede the meagerness that is me.
The buck tumbling before my headlights.
The scrimp of lawn in the mouth of the doe.
from the journal NEW ENGLAND REVIEW
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I wrote "Blue Lights" in an effort to capture the campus of the College of Staten Island at night; I routinely teach evening classes that let out close to 10:00 p.m. An abundance of deer appear out of nowhere, mythic in the misty night. One almost expects them to start enrolling in classes. I wanted also to capture the journeyman experience of teaching poetry in that you go where you're needed. You can end up in strange places. Places where deer walk around like they’re hanging out in their own kitchen.
 
Formal color photographic portrait of Victoria Chang seated with two dogs
"Victoria Chang’s Correspondence with Grief"

“What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed? Lands you never knew? People? Can one experience such a loss? The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. See how the of hangs there like someone about to jump off a balcony?”

via THE NEW YORKER
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Cover of Wanda Coleman's pamphlet, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, from Black Sparrow Press
What Sparks Poetry:
Dana Levin on Wanda Coleman's "The Woman and Her Thang"

"Standing at the magazine rack at Beyond Baroque, I opened Coleman’s chapbook at random and read: 'She kept it in a black green felt-lined box.' Ten monosyllabs—how I loved saying them, each one a kind of floating stone in the mouth—introducing the speaker’s 'thang': seductive and dangerous, wreaking havoc on her love life."
READ THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
18th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 10-15, 2022

We are pledged to create an extraordinary week of virtual poetry workshops and events for you in the safety of your home.
 
Workshop Faculty: Kim Addonizio, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Chard deNiord, Mark Doty, Yona Harvey, John Murillo, Matthew Olzmann and Diane Seuss. One-On-One Conferences with Lorna Blake, Sally Bliumis Dunn, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Angela Narciso Torres. A special Craft Talk by Kwame Dawes. Special Guest Poet: Yusef Komunyakaa. Poet-at-Large: Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
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