Callie Siskel
Time "Person of the Year" was "You."
I was a sophomore in college. I held the mirror up to my friend.
Outside a fraternity, I stood in a circle of women telling each other how pretty they were.
On the walk back to my room, I passed a monument: water running over granite.
The man I loved wanted me in his bed, so I could tell him he was exceptional.
There is a difference between Echo and the spring: one repeats, one colludes.
In his childhood bed, we had sex, and I turned bright red.
He said, "Someone had a good time," and I knew it was over.
I moved out of the dorm with a friend, paid less for the smaller room.
At dinner, she said the chef was staring at her. I agreed.
If I told you how she stranded me, the focus would shift to her, as it always did.
There is beauty in submission, but it depends on what one gains from it.
When a poet came to campus, old and failing, she bared herself like a wet stone drying.
from the book TWO MINDS / W. W. Norton & Company
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Formal color headshot of poet, Gerard Dawe
In Memoriam: Gerald Dawe, Award-Winning Poet

"He was born in north Belfast on April 22, 1952, and in his memoir A City Imagined: Belfast Soulscapes, published by Merrion Press in 2021, he recalled: 'When I was in my mid-60s, I came to the realisation that the stories handed down to me by my mother as a young lad in the 1950s in Belfast made me want to write.'"

viaIRISH INDEPENDENT
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Cover image of Ariana Benson's book, Black Pastoral
What Sparks Poetry:
Ariana Benson on "Dear Moses Grandy, ...Love, The Great Dismal Swamp"

"The first time the land spoke to me through poetry, its message arrived in the form of a letter, not addressed to me, but from one lover to another. In “Dear Moses Grandy, …Love, the Great Dismal Swamp,” the murky, forested, ever-shrinking land of Southeastern Virginia (that was the backdrop of much of my childhood) writes to and commemorates her first lover: Moses Grandy, an enslaved man, who, in his single-person boat and with his rustic, handmade tools, carved canals out of the murk and morass that had scared many intrepid explorers away for good."
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