Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2015! We’re celebrating all month long. Each day we will bring you a poem we love–a selection from one of our published or forthcoming collections. In turn, the featured poets will introduce poems they love. Happy April!
Today’s featured poet is KMA Sullivan, whose collection Necessary Fire is hot off the presses!
Floating
my youngest knew
how to swish sequined tail
splash bathwater
over tile let it flow
down sheetrock
yards of fuchsia fabric
as good as scales
and skin
inches below surface
he still holds his breath
watches bubbles
move toward open air
where his fluid worlds
might open
and combine with
the oxygen of others
like Ariel he collects trinkets
Japanese fans, Hindu gods,
a young Buddha
rest on his dresser
beside homemade incense
as a good luck dragon
carved into blue quartz
glows through photos
of a boy who jumped
into the Hudson River
when his lovemaking
was turned into entertainment,
and a fifteen-year-old
on life support after hanging himself,
two other boys beaten and raped
until they confessed
for my boy I want an ocean
so free he can ride underwater
rivers without fear of riptide
float on the current of himself
where the sound of rushing
water means mermaids
are about to sing
______________________________
KMA has chosen to introduce “Poem About the Moon” by Sam Sax.
She says: “Poem About The Moon” by Sam Sax is a prose poem that perfectly utilizes the compression and urgency of its chosen form to deepen the emotional impact of the language.
______________________________
KMA Sullivan is the author of Necessary Fire (Black Lawrence Press 2015), winner of the St Lawrence Book Award. Her poems have recently appeared in Boston Review, Southern Humanities Review, Forklift, Ohio, The Nervous Breakdown, Gertrude, diode, and elsewhere. Recent essays have appeared in The Rumpus, The Good Men Project, and Nailed. She has been awarded residencies in creative nonfiction and poetry at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Summer Literary Seminars and she is the editor-in-chief of Vinyl and the publisher at YesYes Books.
