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What Sparks Poetry is a series of original essays that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In our new series of Ecopoetry Now, poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Indisputably I recognize the cumulus overhead
as a portion of the night sky the aurora borealis
illuminated years ago while I lay with Liz Charles
in the back of Toby Lawrence’s Westfalia, petting

heavily until Lawrence appeared with a knock
on the hatchback. “The. Northern. Lights. Man,”
an indication he’d made little progress of his own
with the congressman’s daughter in the uncut corn

so I removed my hand from the denim waistline,
the copper button of which I had just undone,
and stepped flushed into the breath-seizing night
under the red-and-green firmament billowing

like gown of light, a mere ten miles from Lansing’s
chained factory gates. Back at the party none could
fathom the kaleidoscopic heavens we described, nor
months later acknowledge what pulsed in Liz’s

brain. Fainting spells soon forced us to, a shaved
head, its tidy box of stitches, a monthlong migraine
covered by ill-fitting wigs, hats. Then one evening
in June we sat on the sidewalk like kids and drew

with chalk. “I’m going to wherever they draw
on the sidewalk all day,” she said. And soon did,
reappearing now and then to swim flirtatiously
through dreams before slipping the subconscious’

grip, so much like this white cloud that eludes
the branches’ grasp before lofting west: the wind-
blown work of her hands—long-traveled, adrift
from parts celestial, a word I haven’t quite relinquished.
from the book RAGGED ANTHEM / Wayne State University Press
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Cover image of Chris Dombrowski's book, Ragged Anthem
What Sparks Poetry:
Chris Dombrowski on "Just a little green, like the nights when the northern lights perform"

"From my seat alongside Rattlesnake Creek, I looked upstream toward the high-elevation wilderness snowfields that framed and fed the floodplain. The water at my feet had once resided there, and before that it existed as moisture trapped inside a cloud, and perhaps before that as fog, the slough’s breath, the valley’s exhalation, ad infinitum."
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Cover image of Aldo Amparan's debut book, "Brother Sleep"
"The Universe Can Fit Inside An Urn"

Emily Pérez reviews Aldo Amparán's "deft and gorgeous debut."  "The speaker takes stock of life after his brother’s death, and Amparán gestures at this need for speaking the unspoken in nine poems titled 'Glossary for What You Left Unsaid.' Many of these poems recollect trauma: episodes of homophobia, bullying, and suicidal ideation; some celebrate time with a lover."

via RHINO
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