Jim Peterson
Children knock on my door,
claiming to have raked my maple leaves
for the fair price of one crisp dollar.
That’s when I make up something good
to tell them. For example, the tale where
I cannot give them one of my dollars
because a giant ear broke into my house last night
and sucked up every noise,
even those beyond the range of human hearing,
and since everyone knows I navigate
by bite-sized bursts of sound
emitted by certain nose-hairs,
and since all my dollars flit around the house
like drunk moths, obviously
I cannot locate said dollars
and must accept aforementioned yard-raking
as a gift. There is nothing so beautiful
as the double-headed silence of two children,
unless it’s the way their gazes
connect in disbelief. Still,
back they come almost every afternoon.
Yes, I’m certain I’ve lived far too long,
for some days after I’ve unraveled
some whopper about a giant rat, let’s say,
who relishes the juicy eyeballs of children,
or some fiery-eyed horse with the wings of a dragon
and hooves of thunder,
I nevertheless drop one of my crumpled dollars
into each of their tiny palms.
No wonder they return, dumping
humongous bags of golden maple leaves onto my lawn
and raking them up again.
I fear every creased and rumpled dollar
in every room and pocket in my house
is doomed. For I pay the price of a good raking
again and again. The sound
of feet kicking up leaves
is as good as breathing deep—breathing long.
from the book THE HORSE WHO BEARS ME AWAY / Red Hen Press
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Imagine an old man, long retired, living alone next door to a family with small children.  Wanting to make money, the children invent a chore they can do for him: raking leaves. What is the value to this old man of a dollar, of the concoction of one wild story after another, of the puzzled faces of children—the sound of them raking freshly dumped leaves in his yard?

Jim Peterson on "Dollars"
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At Stonecoast MFA, you will find inspiration, support, and fellowship. (Isn’t that poetry?)

Stonecoast MFA is a two-year low-residency creative writing program based in Maine. We are committed to advancing social justice and to nurturing the writer’s vision.

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Black-and-white headshot of Ivor Gurney
"The Strange Case of Ivor Gurney"

“By inclination, he was a poet of the prosaic, alert to plain objects and ordinary deeds: cabbages, chocolate, soccer, and tea. Now it was human beings who were reduced, by gunfire and shelling, to red wet things.” 

via THE NEW YORKER
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Cover of Lauren Russell's book, Descent
What Sparks Poetry:
Yona Harvey on Lauren Russell's Descent 

"The result is a poetic, hybrid tour de force that delivers not only the assembled narrative, but accounts of creating the book itself: 'I came to this project in search of Peggy, but it is my life, too, my family’s life, I find expunged from the record.' Descent, after all, is Russell’s deep exploration of ancestry and historical omission."
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