I was thinking about the story of 19-year-old Brian Deneke, a punk musician murdered in Amarillo, Texas, in 1997, from a hit-and-run by Dustin Camp, a football player at a local high school. I was also in high school, about an hour south of where this happened in Amarillo, which uses the nickname Bomb City because it hosts the Pantex Nuclear Power Plant, originally commissioned to (dis)assemble nuclear weapons. The Oklahoma City bombing and the Waco standoff also occurred in roughly the same period. One of my first research papers as a middle school student was about the atrocities of the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I dream of other worlds where these horrors do not exist.
mónica teresa ortiz on "the city that loves the bomb" |
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"For Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, There Must Be Poetry in a Time of Genocide"
"I’ve tried to write about who the advertisers imagine to be their audience, and what that reveals about their own self-perception. About the invisibility of Palestinians and indigenous peoples in this culture that makes such an invitation, with all its implicit lies and violence, unremarkable. In my own poems, I have found that repetition can open up a space to consider absence. It can call attention to what is absent or what is being absented. It can create a visual representation within a written text. It can gaze back at the reader."
via LITERARY HUB |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Sarah Riggs on Language as Form
"I determined each poem would be 47 lines, and the lines do not need to be connected to ones before or after, though they could be. There would be 47 poems. The name of each poem is the date it was written. To be in time, in the calendar, to have a project that is a book that is a series. To feel in the momentum of it. To slant into dream, to invite that we survive through the tilt and whir of connecting synapses." |
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