NaPoReMo #30: Holding hands

  Oh western wind, when wilt thou blow that the small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms and I in my bed again!   I thought for a while about what to post for this last day of my NaPoReMo series. I considered my favourite poem of all time,

NaPoReMo #29: Here and now

  This Maitreyabandhu There’s no law against my listening to this thrush behind the barn, the song so loud it echoes like a bell, then it’s further off beyond the lawn. Whatever else there is, there’s this as well. There’s no law against this singing – nesting I suppose – up in the silver birch,

NaPoReMo #28: Still waters run deep

Pulse James McGonigal Smooth slope of a hill and fornication undoubtedly taking place in its lee. Ash trees shivered in a wind that still had the delicious flick of frost about it. No shame in discussing a lochan’s peatiness out there beyond the shore, the presence of trout, or how his hand bent as it

NaPoReMo #27: The Truth About God

  God’s Justice Anne Carson In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks. On the day He was to create justice God got involved in making a dragonfly and lost track of time. It was about two inches long with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall. God watched it

NaPoReMo #26: Barfly

tonight Charles Bukowski “your poems about the girls will still be around 50 years from now when the girls are gone,” my editor phones me. dear editor: the girls appear to be gone already. I know what you mean but give me one truly alive woman tonight walking across the floor toward me and you

NaPoReMo #25: A library for Everyman

  Why We Need Libraries Ian McMillan It is the mid-sixties, and it does not matter which year exactly; it may have been the year Mrs White threw water on the cat. It may not. At the bottom of the hill, opposite the football factory which will close in 1981 (although nobody knows this because

NaPoReMo #24: A Warning

  Warning Malika Booker 1 Some great-grandmother told her daughter, Never let no man hit you and sleep, pepper the food, boil hot water and throw, use knife and make clean cut down there, use cutlass and chop, then go police. Each daughter told over and over, like brush your teeth, till it stick. How

NaPoReMo #23: The architecture of pleasure

  Rhetorical Questions Hugo Williams How do you think I feel when you make me talk to you and won’t let me stop till the words turn into a moan? Do you think I mind when you put your hand over my mouth and tell me not to move so you can “hear” it happening?

NaPoWriMo #22: We are sailing (II)

  When Considering the Long, Long Journey of 28,000 Rubber Ducks Kei Miller To them who knew to break free from dark hold of ships who trusted their unsqueezed bodies instead to the Atlantic; to them who scorned the limits of bathtubs, refused to join a chorus of rub-a-dub; to them who’ve always known their own

NaPoWriMo #21: I may have been doing it wrong

  And Alison Brackenbury Sex is like Criccieth. You thought it would be a tumble of houses into a pure sea and so it must have been, in eighteen-ten. The ranks of boarding houses marched up then. They linger, plastic curtains at their doors, or, still more oddly, blonde ungainly statues. The traffic swills along