Rowan Ricardo Phillips
I mean, the only zone I think I might
Know, and by ‘know’ I mean ‘this thing hasn’t
Quite killed me yet’ is the triumph of song.
All my poems mean that, I think, really —

This is the edge of my observable
Universe: I can’t see what does not sing,
Or what I have not coaxed notes from out of
Thin air. Like the first time I must have heard

Strawberry Fields Forever. I was twelve
And cupped the soft black sponges to my ears
While sitting cross-legged on a friend’s twin bed
As the janky copy of the cassette

Copied over my memory of where
I was, with whom I was, and even who
I was. All I remember is the song,
All that confident lack of confidence,

Which is what making art is really like.
The dark blood zoning forward and backward
In the brain, the heart like grass in a bowl,
And the burning horizon’s sharp swagger

All of it part physics, part faith, part void.
from the journal THE CORTLAND REVIEW
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Color illustration of feet and legs in striped stockings resting on a red stylised heart in the rain
"A ‘Ghazal’ Sensibility on Valentine’s Day"

"The unconnected couplets disrupt thematic or narrative unity. As Shahid Ali’s lines return to the refrain 'in Arabic' and the 'ess' rhyme before it, they leap from Majnoon Laila to Lorca to the occupation of Palestine. The ghazal’s ability to contain a multitude of ideas, images and tones without bothering to logically link them—its 'contrapuntal air,' as Shahid Ali calls it—makes it, for me, the best kind of love poem."

via NEW LINES MAGAZINE
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Color image of the cover of David Baker's book, Whale Fall
What Sparks Poetry:
David Baker on "The Telling"

"I stood there at the glacier and felt deep below my feet the world moving and the ice dying. Glaciers melt from the bottom, and from within, as they creep along inexorably toward lower ground and, eventually, toward oceans and seas. How to write about such things? How can a small lyric poem begin to suggest the complexities of the subject and this place? I guess the answer is, how can we not try?"
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