Laura Kolbe
She thinks in a smaller hospital
She would remember each face

With some embarrassment
She can remember all the rooms

1421
From whose eaves pigeons tumble
Its permanent winter of shit
Where she would like to put a thin strip of suspended garden
Something in love with guano like hay
Some ruffling infancy of color

707
Where a couple lay in bed, one sick
The two now faceless in ozone hoods
The room wore its stretch of curtain
Tight and broad like a bandeau in June
Unspeakable honeymoon
Ringing for ginger ale all the time

1603
With its own sitting room
A surplus of telephones
One almost expects a little home bar
Silver shakers a cigarette tray

707
Where a couple lay in bed
—was the smaller one sick
Is that just farm logic—
Its stretch of green curtain
Smooth and stiff like a banker's lamp
Amortizing a fixed account

830
She thinks somehow she belongs there
Its shadows and somnolence appeal to her
The clock runs behind
The television sometimes stuck on a Mass
Just its own digestion
Plasma and diode
It is what she will ask for when sick

1118
Snow falls to water
The nurse's badge
Clicks on the bedrail with a bell's tread
The green fixtures spell nausea
Like a lighthouse one sees the swing
Begin before the beam's upon
from the book LITTLE PHARMA / University of Pittsburgh Press
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I'm interested in the classical idea of the "memory palace," that what we remember is predicated on how we imagine our bodies moving through space. During the years of my medical training, I felt the architectural grooves of the hospital becoming the turns in my thought, and vice versa.

Laura Kolbe on "Little Pharma on Rooms"
Headshot of Jillian Hanesworth, the poet laureate of Buffalo
Jillian Hanesworth, Buffalo's Poet Laureate, Calls for Change

"Many white friends have reached out to share support and sympathy and to offer to help. She asks them to be honest with themselves and with their friends and family about systemic racism. 'We need you to talk. We need you to stop sitting around the dinner table acting like everything's great because it's not. Just because you aren't experiencing it doesn't mean it's not happening. Your role in this is to help change the system,' she said."

via NPR
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Cover of Maricela Guerrero's Book, The Dream of Every Cell
What Sparks Poetry:
Maricela Guerrero (Mexico City) on Ecopoetry Now 

"And this is precisely where poetry and poetic communion shelter me with hope without optimism; where, in the different languages inhabited by beings with whom I share the air and water of this planet, we come together in longing for and choosing another way of interweaving, of searching inside ourselves for new ways to reverse this disaster."
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