V. Penelope Pelizzon
Its back and forth, ad nauseum,
ought to make the sea a bore. But walks along the shore

cure me. Salt wind's the best solution for
dissolving my ennui in,

along with these protean
sadnesses that sometimes swim

invisibly
as comb-jelly

a glass or two of wine below my surface.
Some regrets

won't untangle. Others loosen as I watch the waves
spreading their torn nets

of foam along the sand
to dry. I walk and walk and walk and walk, letting their haul

absorb me. One seal's hull
scuttled to bone staves

gulls scream
wheeling above. And here... small, diabolical,

a skate's egg case,
its horned purse nested on pods of bladderwort

that still squirt
brine by the eyeful. Some oily slabs of whale skin, or

—no, just an
edge of tire

flensed from a commoner leviathan.
Everywhere, plastic nurdles gleam

like pearls or caviar
for the avian gourmand

and bits of sponge dab the wounded wrack-line,
dried to froths of air

smelling of iodine.
Hours blow off down the beach like spindrift,

leaving me with an immense
less-solipsistic sense

of ruin, and, as if
it's a gift, assurance

of ruin's recurrence.
from the journal 32 POEMS
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This poem began in Hermanus, South Africa in December 2017 and finished in Milan, Italy in winter, 2020. There are 91 extant drafts in my files, not including the initiating drawings in my sketchbook. It expanded to many stanzas with a tighter rhyme scheme before much of the extraneous detail, including the bleached coral and kelp stipes it started with, finally washed away.

V. Penelope Pelizzon on "Cliché"
Color illustration of a woman's face in which her hair is a landscape and book
Jorie Graham: "Notice All That Disappears"

"For more than four decades, Jorie Graham's poetry has documented the complicated, multidimensional, ever more uncertain sallies of human perception into the bristling presence of trees, birds, streams. Virginia Woolf followed Mrs. Dalloway and others over the course of 24 hours in London. Graham, whose lines are Woolf-like in their walks about the page, tracks a minute in the life of a raven."

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Cover of the issue of the journal Epiphany, in which "Rat" first appeared
What Sparks Poetry:
Karen Leona Anderson on "Rat"

"To write vermin is to ask then who makes them faceless and liquid, seething, scheming, malicious, too much, over and over; who feeds them and then turns away, repulsed. (Was it me? Of course.) It’s to ask who is at home, inside; who is outside. Why vermin are women’s fault and their shadow, their shame and their labor, how making vermin is so much work to do and undo and who that work is for."
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This April, to celebrate National Poetry Month, we'll share popular writing prompts from our "What Sparks Poetry" essay series each morning. Write along with us!
 
Write a poem that slips between past and present tense, noting how the poem changes as you shift verb tenses. Or, write a poem in past or present tense first, and then select certain lines to shift back and forth—it may be that only a single verb tense will differ from the rest of the poem. Or, take the draft of a poem that you’ve abandoned and toggle between verb tenses to see if you can break open new meanings and feelings in the poem.
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