January Gill O'Neil
Inside every woman is a snake. Some think I'm a hoax or an oddity,
rarer than winning Powerball or being struck by lightning. Everything
has a form, even doubt. Think of me as someone you've met in a dream.
Green stalks shade the sun, keep me hidden from the villagers,
the nonbelievers. To find me you must enter me. Oh,
that your body fits into my body makes us unholy. Let me press
my mouth to your scar, run my tongue along your flesh so I can taste
how you wound. The wild boars patrolling the edges won't save you.
Footprints. Flashlight. Machete. Slippers. All that I've left behind.
Inside every snake is a woman. That's the part of me I love the most—
reticulated constrictor, word made flesh, time unfolding, lore or legend,
I am done telling the kinder story. I am a myth of my own making.
Part my snake flesh and you will find me intact, clothed as I was
when I visited the corn. Think of me as the gift you're unsure how to open.
from the book GLITTER ROAD / CavanKerry Press
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In April 2021, seeking motivation during the pandemic, Jennifer Martelli, Cindy Veach, and I started a poem-a-day challenge. Inspired by Diane Seuss and Terrance Hayes, we crafted 30 American Sonnets. Remarkably, we all stumbled upon a peculiar news story of a woman swallowed by a python in Taiwan. Each of us penned a poem based on this bizarre event.
 
Photograph of Victoria Chang

"A Q&A With Victoria Chang"


"Chang thrives at embodying and vocalizing universal feelings of anxiety, joy, grief, fear, and wonder. Further, it’s as if readers of her poetry are invited to visit a theater designed to accommodate a form or tradition with which she is obsessed, like the elegy, the letter, the prose poem. Reading her work chronologically, I was struck by how the personae adopted in Chang’s earlier books peel away gradually, such that the feelings animating her new poems are closer to the surface and more discernible to the reader."

via POETS & WRITERS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Bret Shepard on "Here But Elsewhere"

"The landscape of my childhood comes back in moments where I confront change....What I experience now pulls on the wild things I experienced earlier in life. The gravel runway for airplanes along the tundra of Atqasuk. The snow piled by machine into a temporary mountain near Ipalook Elementary in Utqiagvik. The sea ice breaking up near the shore of Browerville in time for whaling season."
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