Dry Run Creek
  a dead black calf / its eye chemical blue
           —Tracy K. Smith

I read stories about vicious cows that attack      cows in agony
malformed calves      foaming at the mouth      a creek that bubbles

stories about green water      dripping from pipes      unlined
digestion ponds seeping      Teflon sludge      veterinarians

won't get involved      the company just about owns      the town
Wilbur Tennant films himself      dissecting one of his dead calves

this won't get covered up      I'm bringing it out      in the open
for people to see      he points out the tarry teeth

saws into the calf's head      exposes its tumorous brain
cauliflower tongue      green innards      I can't hide from

stories about privilege      greed      some that's mine      some
that harms my neighbors      the people I love      their stories

choked by grief      here I look away      look for earlier scenes
the hilly acres      homeplace for the Tennant boys      long hours

in gardens      cornfields      barns      they eat watercress
from the creek      trap muskrats      their mother flours & stews

maybe at night the boys      spread quilts      under moonlit
elderberry trees      moths crawl over      their hay-scratched hands

their eyes      pulling new shapes      from tree-shadows
the shapes whatever      they want them to be
from the book THE NIGHT THE RAIN HAD NOWHERE TO GO / Belle Point Press
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2025 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner

"The international Griffin Poetry Prize is pleased to announce the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize winner, Psyche Running, Karen Leeder, translated from the German written by Durs Grünbein....The international Griffin Poetry Prize was founded in 2000 to encourage and celebrate excellence in poetry. The prize is for first edition books of poetry written in, or translated into, English and submitted from anywhere in the world."

via GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE
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Cover of Importance of Being Feeble Minded - Nathan Spoon
What Sparks Poetry:
Nathan Spoon on Life in Public

"I hoped for this poem to expand beyond the realm of the scholarly, outward in a serious way relating to societal circumstances we are in together at present—and by societal I mean the global society of human beings sharing a planet, one tragically in a vortex of cascading concerns including war, surging debt and inflation, climate crisis, resource depletion and the crossing of planetary boundaries, growing inequality, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, and the backsliding of democracy.” 
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