I decided to start blogging again, even if only for this one day, but you have to start somewhere and it has been a very long time since I posted. Who knows. May be a very long time again. And maybe not.

I’ve misplaced the one I really wanted to share first, which can only mean it wasn’t ready to be shared (Laurie Rachus Uttich). In her place are two others. Kim Addonizio has been a favorite for at least the 2 years since I discovered her. Charles Jensen is new to me and this format of prose poem with questions following (which are two full sections of his chapbook, “”Instructions between Takeoff and Landing“ ) completely intrigues me. I want to try it, but haven’t. Perhaps blogging again will encourage me.

The Miraculous (Kim Addonizio, “Now We’re Getting Somewhere” 2021)

The band starts the song over,
the rhytms sill wrong, sounds that will never
alchemize to music. My brother’s
new liver is failing. There’s someone’s loud lover
swearing to Christ and the bar to get sober
but the moon is being smothered
by the trees and there is no ladder
far enough. I go down to the mouth of the river

ugly with waste. Yellow foam and trash. A tanker
crawling the horizon. What does it bear –
oil or chemicals. I was taught a man could walk on water.
That if I listened, and unhinged my heart, I’d hear
a presence stirring the air. And I do: God, the murderer
making things perfectly clear

5. Journey to the Center of the Earth (Charles Jensen, “Instructions between Takeoff and Landing” 2022)

I remember when my ex-boyfriend died it felt like a tunnel opened up inside
me and just kept going – into the floor, down into the earth, into the insides
of the earth where we imagine existing all the things we can’t bring ourselves
to speak. Like the universe, grief is infinite and constantly expanding. I lived
in constellations of memories whose designs had no higher meaning then. I
cried so much. I cried because my hope was gone. I told people later grief is
the absence of hope, but even then I knew it wasn’t true. Grief is when you
have hope, and then hope leaves you.

Quiz on this section:

• a. What is the volume of the tunnel described in this passage? Use metric or Imperial measures.
• b. Does the reader really care if the narrator cries? Critique this disclosure.
• c. Describe the loss of a child or pet without using the letter I.
• d. What is death?

Bonus if you’re willing to click through: “Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking”

On Earth just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons…
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief -…

And yes, you might notice a theme in these offerings.