Surviving Survival

In early 1979, when Eugene Smith returned “back to the world” from the Guyanese jungle, my father had made his return “back to the world” more than a decade before, following his completion of a tour in the Vietnamese jungle. When he first returned, my dad was a 22-year-old husband and father of one – like Smith upon his return. Smith’s wife and one child, however, were not waiting for him, nor were they with him; along with Smith’s mother, they had died in the jungle with over 900 other members of Peoples Temple.

New Poem Over At MudRoom!

too long miles later & I have sputtered like this engine needing, I bet, to tug the cables.

What happened; what I felt

For the first time in four years my ICD "delivered therapy," which I discovered days after "the event" when my electrophysiologist's nurse called to ask "if I was okay."

New Poem Over at The Curator Magazine!

the lankiest one, voice on the verge of collecting crushes, is making himself up as he goes, a danger my dad’s admonitions cannot prepare him for; will justify the conflation of boy to body. Real Enough is real enough.

New Poem in Green Mountains Review!

there are ways of being alive that look nothing like the somatic supposition opposite death. To be dead is something else altogether.

New Poems in Madcap Review!

The cracks in my heart have not come from bodies offered in the guise of honey; haven’t shaken my hand seconds too long; taken my eyes for gazing balls; my limbs for casualwear. What pocks its surface could be mistaken for the debris their kind leave behind

New Poems In Awakenings Review!

What you do know is that what the women said about you is true: you are a cavernous hollow in whom no man can find his rightful end. And who doesn’t want to end somehow? To plant a flag, surrender and wilt into rest?

“What a friend we have in Jesus” (& Nikki): A musing response to Nikki Giovanni’s “A Good Cry”

For today’s sermon, we borrow from the book of Nikki (Giovanni, that is).

lkapoet's avatarThe Fight & The Fiddle

Editor’s Note: While our usual editorial style uses poets’ last names on second reference, this essay intentionally breaks with that style as a nod to the intimacy the poet has cultivated with audiences and readers.

By Kendra N. Bryant, PhD

I turned myself into myself and was
jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save
 —Nikki Giovanni, “Ego Tripping (There May Be a Reason Why)” 

Jesus wept. (John 11:35)

&I find Jesus and Nikki to be quite similar, maybe even one and the same. Admittedly, however, I don’t know either that well. But I think I know enuf about them to make such an assertion. See, I’m thinking if Jesus really is on Mars,[1] then Nikki’s fascination with space is really her fascination with herself, but not in an ego-tripping, self-centered fashion; more like a return to Self. Otherwise…

View original post 4,831 more words

Today I remembered that you are dead

It wasn't remembering at all but realizing--probably that's what I was doing, you know, that you are dead, and it felt like chewing foil