Robert Gibb
Under the incoming clamor
Of the fireworks,

The proxy rockets' red glare,
A mother skunk and her kits,

Fleeing the bursts,
Come storming down

My driveway single file—
Eyes front, tails down,

Stripes like the white lines
On the highway. For them

Even such surrogate shelling
Sounds an alarm,

As must the smells
Of starter fluid and meat

Being charred. In 1812,
Boasted Francis Scott Key,

No refuge could save
the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight,
or the gloom of the grave.

The skunks make straight
For the shelter of the trees.

Behind them the sky
Burns to the ground.
from the journal NEW MADRID
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AN INTERVIEW WITH CHASE BERGGRUN, AUTHOR OF R E D, ON THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF ERASURE AND THE LONG POEM
 
"The long poem has historically as we know been a form that men have dominated. And the way that the long poem takes up space is so interesting and fascinating to me as a gendered space, too. I’ve talked with Paige Lewis about this a little bit—it never ceases to amaze me, how radical the act of asking someone to sit with you for a long time unfortunately is if you are not a cis man."

via DIVEDAPPER
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J. Michael Martinez's hand-written version of Rilke's "[You who have never arrived]"

"Rilke’s unpublished missive to a distant beloved became an archetype for much of my sense of the poetic: an epistle (in)to the unknown fueled by a compassion that comprehends radical otherness as an aspect of the self exceeding the self."
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