Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Featuring: Cheryl Boyce-Taylor and Lynn Domina





Cheryl Boyce Taylor


Convincing The Body

Study your poems
when you think you're going crazy
lay naked on the earth
cover your shame with praise poems

cover the bright bay windows
curved around a cruel day
make curtains of your poetry

cruise the sky
cruise the sky
find that slight patch of sun

stack poems, two three five
at a time on top each other
add your tears
make a bewitching violet poultice
cover those wounds child

gather acacia leaves
a dash of sea salt
two unruly beams of light

two drops of blood
from one left hand wedding finger
a fountain pen
three diamond nibs
seven wads of paper

keep by your bedside
one flask kerouac
nine sprigs lorde
three june jordan candles
two tablets clifton

ten wads neruda
three large jars perdomo juice
five reams bonair-agard

one skillet  two teacups
two steel pans
mountainous garlands of
ai ai ai

your reflection
study your reflection
use as mirror rain water
keep calabash full

trace your mouth
lips deformed and bleeding
praise that mouth and swear
swear to love yourself

study your reflection
watch your eyes
look for crossing buffalo
clear a path  ten quick breaths

your heart
strike your heart
strike it child
let it break  break

strike it
beat spontaneous poems
from wrist hips
lips fingertips

heart beat violent
irreverent basin blue poems
beat poems from legs
chest  eyes  breast

now read  read
damn!  like a poet

by Cheryl Boyce Taylor, from her collection, Convincing The Body, 2005, Vintage Entity Press

find Cheryl's collection online at: http://www.vepress.com













Lynn Domina

First Morning in Heaven

Clover lifts slightly, stills, the breeze a brief
silent whiff. You never knew you’d longed
so for silence. Chipmunks here
scatter quietly; field mice
nibble softened seeds. You remember reading
how giraffes only seem mute to human ears;
one female suddenly nuzzles
the top of your head, tongues
a single strawberry from your plate. You’d waited months,
swimming in Squam Lake, to hear a loon cry
until one did cry off to the north, unmistakable as people said.
Your delight fills you again; one cries here, too,
beyond sight. You recall
leafy sea dragons, the most astonishingly bizarre creatures
you ever beheld, as twigs nudge lily pads across the pond,
tousled leaves dipping beneath ripples. They survive 
in the New England Aquarium
and along Australia’s southern coast,
another place you still plan to visit, if only to listen
for a kookaburra’s raucous laughter,
pocket a dropped tail feather, like this one, 
left by the plump male who springs from your porch swing now.
Once you saw a blue heron lift itself from shallows; 
once you saw a bobcat
amble across your road. Impossible, visions 
out of time. Yet you saw
once and see again. 

From Framed in Silence by Lynn Domina

find more information about Lynn's work and order her books at: http://tupress.org/authors/lynn-domina