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Katie Farris
The waiting, sleek as otters, slips
between your lips.

Without the waiting, who can know when spring will come, or snow?
Heading south, the geese all beat
the waiting with their wings.

Turn on the light at 2 am;
the waiting stands, hand
on your head. A most maternal haunting.

Swimming, the human body humps along: each dive in time
ends so close to its beginning.

Help me to spell waiting? I forget. And whom
can I tell how much I want to live? I want to live.

A stone, the waiting weights my body into stone:
what's left, almost a palindrome
from the book STANDING IN THE FOREST OF BEING ALIVE / Alice James Books
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Black-and-white headshot of Annelyse Gelman paired with the cover image of her new, book-length poem, Vexations
"A Conversation with Annelyse Gelman"

"The contrast between a poem as an 'object' (a static, stable entity, with one form and fixed boundaries) and an 'event' (a dynamic, ongoing, mutable performance) has always intrigued me. Is a poem more based in space or in time? Is it more like a sculpture or a film? More urgently, is the poem itself really what’s important, or am I more concerned with how it lives in the reader’s mind during and after an encounter?"

via CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Cover image of New Poets of Native Nations, in which Today's Poem first appeared
What Sparks Poetry:
M. L. Smoker on "Heart Butte, Montana"


"It is then next to impossible for me to ignore the echoes that reverberate from beneath and across the earth’s surface. There is both a human and non-human story here. Such places formed by millennia, marked by water and ice, light and dark. Of shifting rock and the new formation of land, plateau, mountain range. Humans were taken in and the land cared for us—we were gifted survival and song by our plant and animal family."
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