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          The celebration of Christmas in the Appalachians according to
          the Julian Calendar, on January 6th


The claw, the craw, the red-
tailed hawk, dusk-wise,
roosting in a bare catalpa tree.
Harsh old mountains in January.
Matted grass. The body flayed
open like a milkweed pod.
The body as muddy pasture.
I think I was a field once.
My pussy was a cow-smudged creek.
A bull lived in me. He liked to sleep.
Herds of deer half darkness
wavered across me. In winter
I froze. In spring I bled wet-
weather branches. Water witching.
At midnight on Christmas Eve,
all the animals in me knelt—
coyote, cow, the field mice
vibrating with fear, the groundhog
somnolent with cold.
The Christ Child stirred under
my meadow grass, my cow patties.
Half-light threaded the thin trees
edging the creek. A warm
animal exhaled body-hot breath.
The last stars fell, tinkling
and horrific, the sky arced,
a chest cavity filled with pain
and pooling blood, the red
flush of suffering under its skin.
from the book WHEN GOD WAS A CHILD / Bull City Press
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My mother grew up with her father telling her that the cows would kneel in the barn on Christmas Eve. I have always felt that story had some of the true Christmas magic in it and then grew up to love that Thomas Hardy poem—"The Oxen"—and that beautiful ending about how the narrator is still "Hoping it might be so."

Annie Woodford on "Old Christmas"
Clockwise from upper left: Jamila Minnicks, Gabrielle Bates, Laird Hunt, Kwame Alexander, Nathan Go, Stacy Jane Grover, Robyn Schiff, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, Curtis Chin, Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones.
"Ten Writers on Writing Advice: 2023"

"As 2023 draws to a close, we share some of our favorite responses this year to the question that speaks directly to our desire for some guidance through the often-dark labyrinth of the literary life: What's the best piece of writing advice you've ever received?"

via POETS & WRITERS
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Cover of Tarta Americana
What Sparks Poetry:
J. Michael Martinez on Reading Prose


"I wanted to understand its syntactic logic of worlding, and, so, I mirrored Angello's process: in my work, I chose to meditate, word by word, on the chorus of Ritchie Valens' 'We Belong Together.' The prose poem sequence that emerged became a structuring force for the book as a whole; the sequence's prose ruminations on temporality, the body, and love, spread out across the book, acted as scaffolds to Tarta Americana's overarching themes."
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