Kshiraj’s poem is full of intense longing and sensuality. Like ache between my teeth, and i dream of apple-stained tile | i watch you through the webbing of myįrom “Litany of Open Throats” by Kavi Kshiraj
To the inside of my sun-dark knees | i am only one step after another, and there are languages mingled If i love you hard enough, will it drive me alive? do you promise? [ the heat touches her mouth How the heart can change from a car to a bomb, to an old cotton shirt, to a starving child, and how sometimes all of these things can be true at once -the fickle, restless heart with its complex fears and desires. I also admire the myriad metaphors for the heart. I love the rhythm and pacing of this poem, how the tension builds with a driving energy created by the twisting variations in its repeated phrases, the shifting anaphora. I left my heart in my car my heart was a car my car was exhausted We can empathize with the narrator’s new sense of urgency, hear the humming of the cicadas and the stillness when they’ve gone, see and feel the warmth of blood rushing to flush the speaker’s cheeks at this awakening of new eroticism: “I was unsure and I was ashamed/ And then I went around touching everyone for years / Blaming cicadas / Can you imagine it.” The poem also expertly illustrates the fleeting nature of these intense feelings through the extended metaphor of the cicadas, something that comes around maybe once every seventeen years and then it’s gone, leaving you grasping at air “Wondering where did all their bodies go / They were just here, right here.” Then Matthes shows how one innocent touch, even just brushing a cicada off the friend’s neck, can change everything when there is an unexpected heat. Here, the poem’s speaker remembers “standing young and shoeless in a purple dusk” with a friend, daring each other to eat the cicadas (“A dollar for a hollow husk/ two for the living ones”). This poem by Sarah Matthes won the 2019 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, and for good reason.
The flinch of your body, the tightening skinįrom “The Seventeen Year Cicadas” by Sarah Matthes Pinky skimming the hot cotton of your summer shirt Now that you’re warmed up, this month we feature some sizzling poems from Sarah Matthes via Tor House, Daryl Sznyter in Atlas and Alice, Kavi Kshiraj in The Hellebore Press, Eloisa Amezcua in BOAAT Press, Sage Curtis in Tinderbox, and Melissa Crowe in Poem-a-Day. Though I can’t touch, like the girl repeating persimmonĪs the waitress in the diner tells her about a treeĪt the top of the hill she used to see, how beautiful That make my heart jump: oh joy in seeing To say yes, though I want to, looking up at these clouds Here’s an excerpt of Kim’s fine poem, a subtly exquisite delight for the senses: “Eros the Contagion” from her award-winning collection Eros, Unbroken, forthcoming from Word Works this Spring. Smith’s The Slowdown from November spotlighting Annie Kim’s poem Time to turn up the heat on this chilly February with some Poetry We Admire on the theme of Eros- a specially selected curation of recently published poems full of sensuality, desire, and an exploration of erotic love.īut first, a little foreplay if you will.
0 kommentar(er)
