A Nordic Trac on the sidewalk, completely assembled, along with instructions for use Layers of clouds arranged in a way that formed a frame around the sun. An aluminum fishing boat that putted in to the dock slowly, with a big white and black spotted Labradoodle standing on the bow. A snag on a hill…
Author: Margaret Coombs
Poetry, curiosity, place.
Joy as a Priority or Something Postponed
I wrote two little poems last night, thinking I’d fuss with them and post them as a form of practice. This morning I began answering the emails I found lined up with their bold, unopened headlines. Maybe I’ll get to them tonight, I thought about the two poems, which hovered in a happy cloud just…
nobody beautiful…
On the subject of slowness, here are two poets who hint at its virtues in poems I serendipitously stumbled upon today. Maryann Hurtt quotes e e cummings in her poem “Turtle Explains,” published in the October 2021 issue of Verse-Virtual: “nobody beautiful ever hurries.” Turtle “takes this seriously,” finds time to study “crevices / tiny…
Paraphrasing Yiyun Li
Slowness is a virtue. Li reminds us of this as we read #Tolstoytogether. To translate it into my own voice: our time on earth is limited, so why not take as much space as we can by slowing down? I tell myself this as I sort through poems, consider them, read them. Why rush? Read…
Something Great in Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
It’s from “Run’n’Gun.” We played bigger and bigger until we began winning. And we won by doing what all Indians before us had done against their bigger, whiter opponents–we became coyotes and rivers, and we ran faster than their fancy kicks could, up and down the court, game after game. It’s the surprise of…