Song of the San Joaquin will accept poems through September 15. You can find out more at their website: https://www.
This issue honors poet Nancee Maya who passed away earlier this year. There will be a special section dedication section including some of Nancee’s work and also some poems about Nancee. If you would like to submit a poem to this section, you are encouraged to do so through the usual channels.
Aug 31
by Carl Phillips
The last dog I owned, or — more humanely put, so
I’m told — that I used to live with, she’d follow me
everywhere. She died eventually. I put her down’s
more the truth. It is the truth. And now
this dog — that
I mostly call Sovereignty, both for how sovereignty,
like fascination, can be overrated, and for how long it’s
taken me, just to half-understand that. Pretty much my
whole life. Mortality seemed an ignorable wilderness
like any other; the past seemed what, occasionally, it
still does, a version of luck when luck, as if inevitably,
gets stripped away: what hope, otherwise, for suffering?
When did honesty become so hard to step into and stay
inside of, I’m not saying
forever, I could last a fair time
on a small while. Sovereignty sleeps hard beside me. I
pass my hands down the full length of him, like a loose
command through a summer garden. Let those plants
that can do so lean away on their stems, toward the sun.
Source: Poetry (June 2015)
Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.
…while also helping save the post office
Join Stella Beratlis in this free online workshop on writing truth to power via epistolary poems.
Epistolary poems, from the Latin “epistula” for “letter,” are, quite literally, poems that read as letters.
We will read examples of epistolary poems and generate our own epistolary poems exploring resistance.
Stella Beratlis is the author of the collections Alkali Sink (2015) and the forthcoming Dust Bowl Venus (April 2021). Her work has appeared in the anthologies The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology (Story Streets, 2020). She served as the poet laureate of Modesto from 2016-2020. Beratlis is a librarian at Modesto Junior College.
Meeting URL: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/99886601624
Phone one-tap: US: +16699006833,,99886601624# or +12532158782,,99886601624#
Meeting ID: 998 8660 1624
