Adrian Matejka

... People, what you doing? ...
It starts with big frisks in half-disc days.
Cavalcade of wants, slim décolletages
all up in the affluence of forgetfulness.
The haberdasher forgot a necessary button
& now the ready body talks through the space
between zippers. This land of shiny unbuckles
& high heels. Geography of I like it so much.
Topography of I want it so much as we walk
up the backside of a treble clef. It's an actual
epistle—seaside with the heavy clouds,
slick sunbathers minding their own libidos.
Hair ties high noting wrists in the long arch
& excavated bites in the land of rough play—
red & smitten by the bright lake, a city
of fights right behind us. These sticky trees
burning beautifully, these edged pee on me's
at the ledge of decency. Sometimes the tongue
trips & it feels like a slip down the throat
of a handy trumpet. I still don't know how
it ends: leathery reliquary in my thin falsetto
maybe, while your hips look like a couple
of question marks just about to hook up.
from the book STANDING ON THE VERGE / Third Man Books
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Colour photograph of a candlelit memorial outside the National Cathedral, Washington DC
Poetic Elegies Make Space for Pandemic Grief

"In a pandemic, when a flood of statistics threatens to swallow the singularity of every death, contemporary elegies—about the dead, for the dead, in place of the dead—offer us new ways for our grief to work its way past silence. Elegy performs an essential caretaking, both intimate and public, of our dead. Poetry is a labor of survival."

via THE WASHINGTON POST
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Cover of R. W. Franklin's book, The Poems of Emily Dickinson
What Sparks Poetry: 
David Herd on Emily Dickinson's [I Dwell in Possibility —]

"The poem’s possibilities are many. You feel them at every turn; in every space held open by her signature dash. The windows are numerous in this house because the poem’s meanings shift, each word opened to the range of its definitions. When she occupies in the final stanza–when she states her 'occupation'– we see her in her self-appointed role as maker of poems."
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