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 Brenda Sieczkowski, author of Like Oysters Observing the Sun.
Exhume
Pale children in nightscape, heads cocked, burying toys. This is
the way we hide our toys, hide our toys—Smudge of dirty moon
when you bend to kiss me—so early in the morning—on the
neighbor’s porch. Blue flames waver over the giant refinery. The
hollow-eyed children titter and clap dirt from their kid gloves.
Given time, what’s dug up seems re-magical. Fingers with tiny
moons cleaned out. This is the way we save our toys. This is the
way—While you’re deciding to leave me—I’ll draw a volume from
the shelf, cradle its dusty spine. At the bottom of one page
another’s hand has underlined:
Alone and warming its five wits / White owl in the belfry sits
______________________________
Brenda has chosen to introduce: [can’t you see darling] by Kathryn Cowles.
She says: The way the pasted-on lines, despite their brevity and fragmentation, insist on presence(s) inspires me.
______________________________
Brenda Sieczkowski’s poems and creative essays have appeared widely in print and on-line journals. Her chapbook, Wonder Girl in Monster Land, was published in 2012 by dancing girl press. A second chapbook, Fallout & Flotation Devices, is now available from Little Red Leaves’ Textile Series. Like Oysters Observing the Sun is her first full-length collection. Currently, she lives, works, and writes in Omaha, Nebraska.
