Orator
Dig caverns in your mind—proportioned, dry,
mood-lit by simple sconces on the walls;
frame out the ceilings, tile the earthen floor,
close doorways so old memories won't try
to whisper doubtful nothings down the halls,
then set the character you built this for:

Amalasuntha in the empty bath
where you will say they found her, lay a scroll
of Servius unraveled on the floor,
dark dribbles crusted up, an aftermath
of footprints—but you'll need to keep control,
protect her modesty as you deplore

the way she sprawls half covered by her hair,
and trust that outside, on the stage of truth,
your mouth will unlock, break the chalk
of salt on your lips, speak her out of there,
toward the sweating men, the roaring youth
who lap at words like water from the rock.
from the journal THE HOPKINS REVIEW 
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Amalasuntha was a queen of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, assassinated in her bath in 535. She was well educated at a time when few were.

Luca D'Anselmi on "Orator"
CLMP Firecracker Awards logo
CLMP’s 2025 Firecracker Awards Winners Announced

Don Mee Choi's Mirror Nation (Wave Books) won the 2025 Firecracker Poetry Award: “Mirror Nation offers the best of what poetry can provide—a new way of seeing. Once you have read it, it will live in you and with you for the foreseeable future. Arriving at a crossroads in the American colonial project, this collection is both testament and testimony to the corrosive forces of empire.”

via LITERARY HUB
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What Sparks Poetry:
Sarah Riggs on Language as Form 

"I determined each poem would be 47 lines, and the lines do not need to be connected to ones before or after, though they could be.  There would be 47 poems. The name of each poem is the date it was written.  To be in time, in the calendar, to have a project that is a book that is a series.  To feel in the momentum of it. To slant into dream, to invite that we survive through the tilt and whir of connecting synapses."
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