Claire Meuschke

Like any Tucson vehicle your stepfather's truck peeled into a collage of white and off-white flames. Structures reformed from a five-month long summer of trash bins melted into each other.

Not much to say, I would say license plates out loud. Frequent only because of their infrequency. Alaska. Hawaii. When your mother asked my heritage, you cut her off. Doesn't matter. Isn't really something. Then you bought a wok.

I didn't smoke, but I smoked your cigarettes. We liked the same poets, teal, clunky New Balances, Blood Orange. Oo we said at front doors we liked. We smirked more than we laughed.

I lived where tempered car glass shattered into harmless pebbles, puddled at the curb. I hovered my foot over to mimic a vacation of testing the waters. I fantasized I could explain the laws of thermodynamics as a threshold of empathy where we might venture into error.

I didn't have furniture. We would lie side-by-side on my ugly wall-to-wall carpeting. Are you at home in your body? I hoped if I said no you would touch me. I once saw you admire our reflection in a storefront. You said you weren't either. So tall and white. When you put your bee suit over me, I knew it wasn't unique to mention outer space as soon as the words came out.

You called all your exes they. They ended for neutral reasons. I inherited a dog who bit your calves. Ow you would say slowly in forfeit. You always forgave. You forgave the bees that would sting you when you fed them wildflower patties.

It snowed when you were away pollinating almonds. In my video you could only tell from how the flakes vanished on the dog's black fur. You sent a picture of white blossoms for miles like a heaven lowered. You had a talent for moving gently. You called it a lack of ambition.

from the journal ANNULET 
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There are 1.2 million acres of almond orchards in California, and the operation requires honey bees from all over the United States to arrive as cargo to pollinate the blossoms. I wrote this poem thinking about a beekeeper-poet I dated and how we moved around each other carefully. Inevitably, we performed the small blunders that can occur when meeting someone new and searching for resemblance.
Color photograph of the inscription on Dante's tomb
Honoring Dante 700 Years After His Death

Every evening, volunteers in Ravenna read a single canto of the Divine Comedy at Dante's tomb. "'Reading Dante is perhaps the truest and most profound homage that we can offer,' said Francesca Masi, secretary general for Ravenna’s Dante 700 organizing committee. 'It requires everyone to make an effort to go toward Dante, while too often we ask Dante to come toward us.'"

via AP NEWS
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Cover of Sylvia Plath's book, The Collected Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Corinna Vallianatos on Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying"


"Nothing is ever nothing—description gives nothing shape. The seeing gains power, even as the one doing the seeing recedes. The bounty of what’s come before, the berries and their juices and the milkbottle the speaker uses to collect them, which brings to mind the body and domesticity, lifts at the end into the elemental, something seemingly less comforting but, to me, more so."
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