wild petrichor, smell of wild rain, caught in the body, wild disrespectful,
Trace Howard DePass

(t)his was the one answer i found. i forget to drink water. another omnitemporal question, this is the one that brought me to answer, how can i be black and wanting to be referred to & not mention my sister's, my mother's, my theydie's, my homies deaths in particular? friend is an evergreen term in temperate cities. my good friend called to tell me what happened & when i get these calls i forget to drink water because i forget water actually exists & i remember that i am someone who gets called. on. i suppose i wasn't water but was. in. deep waters and i've missed a call several times. water in my throat, now at any now, there are some people on the phone documenting a world happening to them & there are some people that need to listen & there we are echoing already gone & trying to leave this place & elsewhere yet can't go. (t)here is no where. water in my throat i waded in & capitalized on & made recyclable for other content in order to survive at anywhen. i had the capacity for calls & my phone bill ain't go to collections this month as water collects → my students dap me in the hallway because i know how it is outside these hallways. it adds a gold foil leaf to me being the strong jawn along with shawty, we make capacity & are not like these other boos. i heard grief as a form of love unable to give of itself unable to give of self, a bottled love, unable. am i drive or crushed by flow? water in my throat, i waded in since last election, since last big man who took over, i asked where, with what, do we rebuild together from here? Grief, water in my throat, if you are the unrequited eye of all my life & all the love i have left to give, lost, trippin, cycling, if i mounted you down, steady, changeless on this black lowboy all ← bottled up & put a cap on you, would devotion pour me godless →
as it did before the call to, when, for the first time, lost, i cried your water?

(t)here's altar candles & a vigil's worth, cheers to rebirth, here's room
enough for forgiveness to live & let go, intent: to be cleaned by flood.

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Ariana Benson and Michelle Peñaloza
Winners of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize & the James Laughlin Award Announced

“These two awards represent the exciting promise of helping readers gain new understandings of our world while creating new, living literary canons. We congratulate the 2024 recipients of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and James Laughlin Award: Ariana Benson and Michelle Peñaloza, respectively. We’re grateful for the care and attention of our celebrated judges, some of whom are former winners themselves, as we bring these two exceptional collections into the hands of so many readers across the country.”

via THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS
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What Sparks Poetry: Mathias Svalina on "Thank You Terror”

"The best description I know of the creative process can be found in Remedios Varo’s 1957 painting The Creation of Birds. In the painting, a figure—either half-owl or a person in an owl-costume—refracts distant starlight through a triangular magnifying glass. The refracted starlight dries birds drawn with a pen emerging from a violin worn around the owl-person’s neck. The birds, as their ink dries, lift off the page & into life."
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