left unburied to rot, black girls
writhe on asphalt. their shadows seethe
& seek out their ancestors. call on papa
legba in search of roots. seek a denouement
for black girls. call on all living & lived
& lost. but black girls blend into
backwoods. slip into soil. feed crops.
all unburied, cut in. out. shimmer
in back-road ditches. fauna lost.
seek a truth to their sentence & exile.
hovering, the night opera. never enough
of a problem here. gorged sewers cough.
exile now sounds sovereign. like it's a gift.
a little air. black girls abandon this town. a blessing.
absent the gris-gris. absent the wool cut. trickle
back into rusted pipelines. blood in the water.
moan. sputter. cling to hands bleached clean.
they know that there is never enough evidence.
become a curse on the head of this city. become
the aching in this asphalt for: something.
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Stylised image of a lit house at night
"A Brilliantly Wry Poem About Poetry"

Carol Rumens explores "House," where Robert Browing expresses his "opposition to autobiographical and confessional genres. At the same time, it can hardly fail to remind us of Browning’s devotion to the dramatic monologue. This adds a pleasurable layer of irony, since one of the significant devices in his treatment of the form is unintentional self-revelation."

via THE GUARDIAN
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The Cover of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's book, The Heat Bird
What Sparks Poetry:
Karen An-hwei Lee on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s “Farolita”


"Today, as I re-read this poem, I enjoy the way it yields to light, as if the paper strip changes into a page, and the page of the poem into a farolita, or vice versa. In this way, it’s mostly about light without saying the word light more than once. It blurs the boundaries of thingness and mystery, obliquely pointing us to tangible and intangible realms of knowing."
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