Ibe Liebenberg
And he has been dead so many years
I barely recognize him

But for him   I could fake that heart
Into beating  a few more times

Of compressions
I'd breathe for him

Press my lips into his
Even though it is against protocol

Ribs give under weight
    I fall through

Thirty one shitty     Thirty two beautiful
Reunited minutes    I lose count

In the chaos of the body
I barely knew him anyway

    In the ambulance
    My hands consent

To skin becoming cold
Arms practice pushing away

    At the hospital
    They cannot separate us

So I apologize for the violence
Of not letting go
from the journal THREEPENNY REVIEW 
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This poem deals with the deep complexities that sometimes occur with the job as a first responder. Not only the witnessing of traumatic events, but sometimes a patient can resemble a loved one. The struggle with the intrusion of personal life into the professional balancing with both strength and weakness. 

Ibe Liebenberg on "Doing CPR on Some Dude Who Looks Just Like My Father"
Mónica de la Torre On "Channeling Curiosity Into Language"

"Amping up potential misunderstandings, code-switching performatively, and tapping into the sonic possibilities that rubbing the two languages together opened was an alternative to the conventional forms of reading the work to a live audience that had felt unproductively constraining to me. I was neither a page poet nor a spoken word poet, much as I appreciated some of the work done in both camps. The options were endless and I simply didn’t understand why everyone kept falling back on received modes, none more 'natural' than the other, and both equally theatricalized."

via LITERARY HUB
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Coverimage of Diane Seuss' book, Modern Poetry
What Sparks Poetry:
Diane Seuss on Reading Prose


"Keats’s ballad opens with three stanzas in the voice of a questioner, after which the knight-at-arms takes over, answering the questioner through storytelling. Likewise, set at the center of Lorca’s poem is a dialogue between the older and younger man. As the green girl teeters on the balcony, suspended between dream and reality, life and death, so Keats’s knight occupies the in-between, stranded by the faery 'On the cold hill’s side.' And each poem, in its way, serves as an allegory for the container itself, the ballad form, which inhabits the liminal space between narrative and lyric, story and song."
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