Fracture Ellen Bass When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away— relocated they call it— their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming. Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart, twisted knot, hot blood rivering to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet. Just weeks before I watched a…
Daytona 500 by Kayleb Rae Candrilli Where we’re from, we know ballet as Dale Earnhardt gliding through the traffic of Daytona; we know dance as our hands moving across a table of drunk Miller Lites. This is universal because I say it is. When my mother called me Kayleb for the first time, I remembered…
Death is coming and leaving the tavern, death leaving and coming in. by Frederico Garcia Lorca Many years ago I wrote this poem into one of my little notebooks. There are nine of these small notebooks, small enough to fit inside of a rear pocket of my blue jeans. I liked the poem by…
Reading this poem a few days ago, I knew the poem deserved feature in a blog post. This poem shows the bastardization of language, a symptom of the decay of comity and of peacable order in our towns and cities. The controversy over the status of the door, consciously or unconsciously an attempt to…
Six of us, a wide ranging discussion last night. The topic was death; more precisely, pondering whether death gives meaning to life. The discussion was satisfying. We did not resolve the matter after an hour and a half of back and forth. Briefly in the midst of the session we touched on guns, mass…
Always something comes to mind, for which I discover a few words to compose a paragraph or two. Poets are the true seers of a generation giving definition to the world such as it is, suggesting what is likely in store. Upon reading this poem I knew, “this is it.” This is what I’d…
This passage from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Dry Salvages is one of my favorite. There are many phrases in these lines that are analogous to an arrow striking dead center to the bulls eye. The poem overall is a meditation upon a seafaring way of life. The point of view offered proposes to be…
Dunbar By Anne Spencer Ah, how poets sing and die! Make one song and Heaven takes it; Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; Chatterton, Shelley, Keats, and I—Ah, how poets sing and die! Anne Spencer, born on February 6, 1882, on a plantation in Henry County, Virginia, was a poet from the Harlem Renaissance movement. She published…
My Love by Bruce Nugent My love has hair Like midnight, But midnight fades to dawn. My love has eyes Like starlight, But starlight fades in morn. My love has a voice Like dew-fall, But dew-fall dies at a breath. My love has love Like life’s all, But life’s all fades in death. Richard…
Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself. Georges Bataille (1977). “Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism…
