On Being Told You're Dying, but Not Quite Believing It
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Because around you, the mortal world is always dying,
that banana you left behind at breakfast and that calf

you just saw mooing for its mother in the pasture.
Oh, vaccines and antibiotics and moisturizers can only hold

death at bay for so long, its breath on us a push towards the door.
Grab your coat, death says, get ready for adventure!

Let’s play a game in which no one ever dies,
all serene and ageless—a universe of unicorns, dynamic as glass,

impossible to impassion. After all, angels have no investment
in the living, in the dirty nature of breeding and birth,

in our grubby hands clutching at the soil from beginning to end,
as if to stay a little longer. You remember volunteering

in the Children’s Hospital ward, little faces as sunny and smiling
towards death as they were towards popsicles, or a new set of crayons,

while their parents looked on, afraid and weepy.
And anyway, is there any way really to prepare for that goodbye,

to send your body...elsewhere, to break down quietly? We can choose
to time our sorrow. I believe in today, this apple that isn’t quite ripe yet,

this poem that isn’t finished, a bed rumpled with my husband’s still
sleeping form, my lungs still breathing, my fingers still on this page.
from the book FLARE, CORONA / BOA Editions
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When I wrote this poem, I had been told by three specialists that I was dying of liver cancer. Somehow, I still believed that I might not die. Mortality helps us value our time, the transitory beauty around us. The end of the poem represented my strong attachment to my life in progress. Seven years later, here I am, still kicking, still with a finger on the page of an unfinished poem. 
Tara Prakash Named First -Ever Youth Poet Laureate of Maryland

"18-year-old Rising senior Tara Prakash was performing at the Kennedy Center when she heard the news that she was to be named Maryland’s first-ever youth poet laureate.  Prakash told WTOP, her parents had been informed ahead of time, and kept it secret to surprise her. When she heard her name coupled with the words 'Youth Poet Laureate'for an entire state, she told WTOP, 'I was like, I can’t be hearing this right!'"

viaWTOP NEWS
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Cover image of Timothy Donnelly's book, Chariot
What Sparks Poetry:
Matthew Tuckner on Ecopoetry Now

"Donnelly’s work has always been in conversation with Keats, but it is here, through Chariot’s strictness of form, that Donnelly broaches on what Keats called the 'egotistical sublime,' the notion that there is a direct correlation between 'voice' and environment. Form molds and directs the thinking in these poems, “This Is the Assemblage” included. Yet form also becomes a stricture to push against in these poems, further articulating the question asked by Whitman that Donnelly enlists as the book’s epigraph: 'to be in any form, what is that?'"
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