Brionne Janae
when you have closed your windows
against the cold and all your winter terror
you can hear them in the street

his voice thin and so close to breaking
reminds you of mornings back home
don't touch me don't fucking touch me

he cannot be any clearer and still
you can only just catch the woman pleading
she must not be as desperate

as he is hurt or else you'd recognize
that tooyou have so much practice with this waking
to bear witnessearlier in the night

when you had wanted to drift into peace
it was the neighbor's toddler
and the crisp slap of a grown palm against his pudgy thigh

as if that would quiet himsometimes
it's the animal sounds from below or the crash
of pots or the dull thud of flesh against a wall

that makes you think of Daddy a boy in that house
of all the things he learned to forget
and what a necessary skillrevision
from the book BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS / Northwestern University Press
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Color headshot of Roger Reeves in sun and shade
"Ten Questions for Roger Reeves"

"I think of myself like a cabinet-maker. I like to make cabinets. I’m not an interior designer, which is what making a book is. When putting together a book, you must switch from making individual poems (which feel like books to me but that’s another discussion) to making something for which people will inhabit."

via POETS & WRITERS
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Cover of Isabel Zapata's book, Una ballena es un pais
What Sparks Poetry:
Isabel Zapata (Mexico City) on Ecopoetry Now

I wrote the book Una ballena es un país (translated as A Whale Is a Country by Robin Myers), in an attempt to say what the language of the academy and the language of activism hadn’t allowed me to say....I conceived this book as an invitation to challenge the boundaries between action and reality, between poetry and essays and stories, between the role we think we play on this planet and the role that climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction demand we take up.
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