national poetry month, poetry

And Many Poems Later…

Posted on by Amanda Stovicek D'Alessandro

I have been keeping up with the daily poems on my threads account @ poetamsd_ but I’ll share some of my favorites below.

A BOUQUET OF LIGHTNING
To grab the sky in a hurricane
rain paints sorrow on your arms
thunderous applause in a heartbeat
waiting for a gathering flash
veins pump new electrical work
connect you to the ground
like livewire and wait
scrape knees in debris
cloud coriolis and snap spin
you flash palm pressed
into ephemeral light.

I want to tell you how
“the slightest taxidermy
thrills me” as if that will explain
how my hands shake on the dash
when you drive my ’96
Honda down dark roads the stars
our only company but my mouth slacks
at the speed the bodies
of wild animals litter the ditches
blurring into rainbows
of red and black and glass
glints from green bottles
turned to confetti on asphalt
as if the broken could be beautiful
if we were travelling fast enough

(line from Kevin Young’s “I am Trying to Break Your Heart”)

Cradled in the stomach of the apocalypse
a fresh hell scpaed with bright billboards
and neon flowers shaped from micro
plastics. Inside elastic bands of muscle
tense and release to the pulse of nostalgia
90’s radio and fringed jackets, coke bottles
thicker than your finger. The glow is rad
as in radiation we spillt from our mouths
likes rivers that have all but dried up. I love
a drought in winter, pray for no snow so
I can step outside and soak in sun. Banish
SAD with parting clouds and burning hydrogen 93 million miles away
that is undoubtedly trying to kill
us too. Ultraviolet is the color I think
of when drowning in my overconsumption.
The clean surface is an empty one.
I think the earth has the same idea.

“You do not have to be good” enough
for the sun to rise for the sky to blue
for the grass to dance in the wind
for the robins to hop for the trees to bud.
You do not have to be good enough
for the moon the shake into the sky
and cover the sun in her brilliance
and turn day to night and darken
to a black hole the sun whose light
streaks out a halo of white hair
a burning brilliant thing covered
converged. You don’t have to be
anything more but you.

(line from Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”)

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national poetry month, poetry

Two Poems, April 2

Posted on by Amanda Stovicek D'Alessandro

Two Poems inspired from prompts on Threads (Amy Kay Poetry and Octavia Knight Poetry).

IN PRAISE OF

the small feat of my body
the growing around
like a blanket
wrapped in dark blood
twice the seams sewn inside
creating new someones
for the world.

LOVING YOU WAS HONEYCOMB

stung on the palm
as I reached for your
cells sweet sticky
burden on the tongue
heft of earth in your making
pollen potion and slice
of a thin wing
a body weighed by nectar
clung to your legs
yellow of myself
make me a new thing
transform me in your guts
splinter me wide open
in a halo of buzzing.

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national poetry month, poetry

Happy National Poetry Month

Posted on by Amanda Stovicek D'Alessandro

April 1, National Poetry Month again, and I’ve got quite a few poetry things planned for myself this month! Feeling like I’ve dipped my toes back into writing in the most beautiful and slow way, a way that hopefully will allow me to enjoy my writing instead of worrying about submitting or perfecting. Just let the poems and fragments flow.

Alienation

One quarter sunrise over red mountains over red plains and riverbeds snaked through red earth. A rust over every featureless rock face twisting summits out of sight. Slight scar the tallest mountain the slowest ascent the curl of ancient eruptions a shadow. All we know is collapse. Canyon over canyon over cut in stone eddies and wanting estuaries an absence a silence of land whispering what was.

Olympus Mons – ESA Mars Express
Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck
Image created processing data from: archives.esac.esa.int/psa
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poetry

Cities & Memory – Agregata

Posted on by Amanda Stovicek D'Alessandro

After Italo Calvino’s INVISIBLE CITIES

A thin black spires raises to the sun-soaked sky, a calm choked with flowers. All people invisible as the dew, light fractures them open in squares and markets, on balconies and terraces. The water only exists in memory with the land, long canals dig the city like veins, but their hollow is dusted with wild debris: nightshade and purpleberries, chickweed and flamevine. The wilderness within the city walls exists among the invisible people too, their shadows carve grooves in every stone surface.

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thoughts

2024 – Arbitrary Shift in Time Begets Hope for Change

Posted on by Amanda Stovicek D'Alessandro

Why is the New Year always when people make resolutions to change or be better or do things differently? We’ve marked this shift, the flip of the calendar, the clock striking midnight as another chance to be our better selves. And yet, it’s just another midnight.

I do have resolutions this year. I hope they will stick. I want to live simpler, I want to be more connected to the people around me, I want to vanish most social media because I am a doomscroller, I want to read more, and I want to write more.

How these things happen won’t be linear and probably will look more like the rolling landscape of eastern Ohio, ups and downs, but slowly climbing into the Appalachian Mountains. Slowly moving upward.

A photo of part of our Christmas tree with several ornaments.
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poetry, reading, the Sealey Challenge, thoughts

Things I’ve Learned About Myself While Attempting the Sealey Challenge

Posted on by Amanda Stovicek D'Alessandro

So, it’s barely week 2 of August and I have to call it “quits” on the Sealey Challenge. I’ll leave up my previous post with the four books I read, but I have realized some things about myself and my time and my life right now. And I’m going to give myself some grace.

1. I barely have “free” time.

1a. Motherhood is tough for me. I spend a lot of my free time thinking about my kids. It’s so weird. I finally have time to myself and I either collapse on the couch to stream a cooking show and stare at pictures of my kids OR I want to play a video game that I’ve been trying to finish for three years.

1b. Phone addiction is real and tough to break. I’d rather have a book in my hand, and yet I inadvertently find myself scrolling the nonsense on social media over and over again. I am not sure what to do about this because digital well-being has not worked for me in the past.

2. And when I do, the last thing I want to do is read something I’ve “assigned” myself to read.

2a. Assigned reading sucks, even when I love the books/authors. I stare at the books propped up next to me on the nightstand at night and I find myself searching for something else. (Currently still reading So To Speak by Terrance Hayes, but also reading The Retreat by Sarah Pearse because crime thrillers are my jam).

3. I have been trying to prove myself to someone/the writing community by doing this challenge, and I haven’t been enjoying it.

3a. This challenge felt like work, like I was trying to prove myself to some nameless person or persons who value these types of things for clout or something. I felt like if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t be part of the poetry community. Like it was some necessary bragging I had to have under my belt.

3b. I don’t enjoy this pressure I’ve put on myself to prove I’m a worthy poet or participant in the poetry community. I am worthy. I have worth and my poems have worth.

I don’t really know how to end this post, but I do know when I read poetry books I want to spend time with them, I don’t want to breeze through and try to make it all in one day. I’ve got to spend time with these works–however long that takes.

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poetry, reading, the Sealey Challenge

The Sealey Challenge

Posted on by Amanda Stovicek D'Alessandro

Today marks the first day of my first attempt at the Sealey Challenge, to read a book of poetry a day for the whole month of August. Head over to my Threads account to see daily updates! I will update this post with the growing list of books I read. Happy poetry!

  • August 1-2, Always A Body by Molly Fuller
  • August 3-5, You Can’t Pick Your Genre by Emily O’Neill
  • August 5-7, Tender Tender by Jessica Jewell
  • August 7-9, So To Speak by Terrance Hayes
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poetry, thoughts

Happy Pride Month!

Posted on by Amanda Stovicek D'Alessandro

We need to protect LGBTQ+ persons in this country. Now is the time for visibility and support. There are so many amazing poets to read this month who identify as LGBTQ+ and I encourage you to read them and learn about their experiences and share their creative work. A few great LGBTQ+ poets (and this is an incomplete list, obviously): Eileen Myles, Danez Smith, Sappho, Saeed Jones, Adrienne Rich, Savannah Brown, Audre Lorde, … Just to name a few for you to check out!

Here’s a poem from Saeed Jones:

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