Jonathan Weinert
When we were dead, our vexed
tongues hung limp.
You'd made your done face, more or less,
and that was it.

We slept a slow green sleep.
And then the grass grew bronze and stiff
and all we knew was grass
and the ways through grass
and the small strange laws of sleep.

There the ferns grew like hair on the heads of the old dead.
The young dead ate their jam of fig and white cheese.
We wrote our odes and told our jokes
and laughed or rolled our hard white eyes.

You'd think we'd grow as tired of this as we had in life.
But when the weird bell called
and the halls of the dead were filled with the smells
of pine and moss, then how
we loved our deaths the more
and kept on in the ways of death
and left the chance of new life to the ones
who weren't yet done with time.

We were. We'd get in bed there,
in the grass town of the dead,
left leg to right leg, sex to sex,
and let death flow from chest to chest,
a cold sweet air we had no need to breathe,
and hold it there in a deep green swoon
while the earth filled up with dust
and passed through an age of dust
on its way to the last days of dust.
from the book A SLOW GREEN SLEEP / Saturnalia Books
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This poem started life in Victoria Redel’s summer workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, several years ago. Victoria gave a single instruction: words of one syllable only. Despite the humble beginning, “Green Swoon” became the lead poem in "A Slow Green Sleep." I’m always astonished at the power of self-imposed limitations like these. I think there must be a lesson in how to live in that.

 Jonathan Weinert on "Green Swoon"
Color headshot of a smiling Carl Phillips
"Carl Phillips Wins Jackson Poetry Prize, $75,000 Award"

"The prize is awarded annually by Poets & Writers to an American poet of exceptional talent....In their citation the judges noted: 'Phillips is a love poet; he wants to know what one human has to do with another, what one owes another, and how all of this translates into desire and the capacity to inspire moral or immoral reactions.'"

via POETS & WRITERS
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Cover image from Bear Review
What Sparks Poetry:
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes on Ama Codjoe's "Superpower"

"Each time I read 'Superpower,' I’m astonished by the turns the poem keeps making: from the playful to the horrifying, spanning over a hundred years in a few lines. The poem moves from an imagined fantasy of a superhero, to the folk hero John Henry, to an unnamed enslaved woman, to a (re)imagined memory of the speaker’s mother."
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