Todd Davis
Each day I think this will be the last
warbler. With the seasons confused,
these small birds stay longer and longer
to starve. Wrapped in the long cord
of its vine, I eat a fox grape to darken
my mouth. An itinerant word flees,
a bracelet of language fastened
to the lone deer the neighbor shot
and quartered. Like a white-footed mouse
burrowing beneath snow, the stone in my sister's
body opens to infection. The doctor diagnoses
the shadow and buries it underground
to hold the poison.
The geologist also seeks
what's imprisoned. All around us pump jacks
and the sounds of new wells being drilled.
The derrickman ignores what happens
when fossils are dislodged and scattered.
Where the mountain was cut to the ground
there's nothing to hold back the flood.
The last year of his life my father struggled
to breathe. I missed the hour of his death
and woke to blood sopping the pillow.
I pull on my boots before dawn. The elevator
cage clanks as it descends the shaft. Without
much light, its impossible to see
where the sea used to be.
from the journal SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW
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Color cover image of Olivia Muenz' book, I Feel Fine
"We are. Fine. Welcome to My Book"

Marty Cain reviews Olivia Muenz's new book. "I Feel Fine clearly asks the reader to approach the text through the lens of disability—Muenz’s bio characterizes her as a disabled writer, and Laura Mullen’s blurb on the back of the book describes it as an 'important addition to the field of disability studies.' But at the same time, the first poem of the book begins with an affront to easily consumable forms of identity performance."

via MOSSY REVIEWS
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Cover of Daniela Naomi Molnar's book, Chorus
What Sparks Poetry:
Daniela Naomi Molnar on "chorus 27 / Ojito Canyon / what consoles does wondering console"

"Poetry is borne of an elemental urge to connect with the deep time wildness of language. Like a poem, language is an ecosystem, made of the same stuff we’re made of, which is the same stuff the planet is made of. To speak a word, we move air through the fiery earth of our body, from the wet inside skin of lungs out through the watery trachea by the muscled earthwater of the tongue."
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