Ryan Vine
We’re walking to the car, crunching snow
across the yard, overburdened, as usual

with backpacks and books and lunches
in bags, when my son says, You

would make a good grave. What? I say.
My gun could do that. You don’t have a gun,

I remind him, as he climbs into his car seat
and waits, smiling, for the familiar zip

and click of the belt. Dad, he says, staring
down the fingergun inches from my face,

you’re my best friend. Across the street,
the birch look thinner and whiter in snow.

I turn off the news, but too late—too late—
and drive slowly, so we can watch two crows

tuck and shoot through the tangled branches,
like the two he loves from his favorite

story book, Odin’s black angels, Hugin and Munin,
thought and memory, sent out across

the world each morning with the hope
that they come back. Today, luckily, we

unbuckle his seatbelt, and my son kisses
my hand before we cross the street.

Today we hang his coat on the hook
by his name, and he runs through

the open door and into the bright room
of children playing without saying goodbye.
from the journal BLACKBIRD
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Cover of Sandra Lim's book, The Curious Thing
"I Am Hot and Tiny, Yet I Wrote Jane Eyre"

Aria Aber reviews Sandra Lim's new book, The Curious Thing. "She melts the rigidity of the system, bends it and makes music out of its severity. The poet sees the lyre everywhere, be it in the 'berserk patterns' of the pigeons on the street, or in a formula of numbers."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Cover of Ellen Bryant Voigt's book, Messenger
What Sparks Poetry: 
Martin Mitchell on Ellen Bryant Voigt's Messenger

"She is a poet of control and precision; across decades and amid differing poetical movements, Voigt is steadfast in her adherence to a clear-eyed iambic elegy—an elegy defined most strikingly by her devotion to unsentimental self-interrogation and her equally unflinching assessments of public life."
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Graphic promo for the book, Ghettoclaustrophobia, from Diode Editions
Funny how the universe beats
against itself creating echoes

How far can you go back? they said, Far,
she said, how far? they said, So far, she said,

It becomes a chant, she said,
I know all the names of my mothers

from “Black Book of Creation” in Shanta Lee Gander’s Ghettoclaustrophobia
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