Voices of Haiti: A Post-Quake Odyssey

FREE EVENT: Join poet-musician Kevin Simmonds at the Corcoran this Wednesday and Thursday (July 25 and 26 at 8:30 pm) for special performances of Voices of Haiti: A Post-Quake Odyssey. 

These performances are in association with the International World AIDS Conference. Voices of Haiti is a multimedia work featuring the poetry of Kwame Dawes, soprano Valetta Brinson and the photography of Andre Lamberston. FREE but reservations are required. Register at https://getinvolved.corcoran.org/voices_of_haiti_july_25 and/or https://getinvolved.corcoran.org/voices_of_haiti_july_26 

From our friends at Mothertongue - a chance to write this summer!

Join us for Mothertongue's Summer Womens* Writing Workshop!


Wednesday, August 1st @ 7:00pm - 8:30pm
DC Center 
1318 U Street NW
Washington, DC, 20009


Need some support to get your creative juices flowing?
Want the company of other women* writers?
This is the place for you!Workshop will be facilitated by: Eryca Kasse
Please bring your pen and paper and get ready to be inspired :)


RSVP Today! Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/323016957791470/?notif_t=plan_user_joined


**mothertongue defines "woman" broadly as anyone for whom "woman" is or has been a primary part of their identity and experience.
***mothertongue is trans- and gender-variant inclusive. If you were raised a girl, identify as a woman, or both, you are a part of us.


Facilitator: Eryca Kasse is a longtime Mothertongue volunteer. She is a writer and poet of the written and spoken word. Eryca has been published in Milk & Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry. Eryca is a social worker at a community mental health center where she incorporates Writing Therapy into her practice. She lives in Washington, DC with her two cats Nina and Olive.

Poem of the Week: Carolee Sherwood

        

   

Apiary     

 

They build boxes upon boxes, great honeycomb cities. Rumbling

trucks deliver parcels of pollen. Pretzel vendors leave good luck

trails of salt along the sidewalks. Busy taxi cab tongues lick up

passengers talking into their phones. Crowds cross lines

of the grid, commanded by the flashing white man

on every corner. Rows of veterans lean along the walls,

missing wings they lost in the war. The boys have dyed

their yellow stripes black, applied eyeliner, given into the sting.

Designer ads cover everything up, fashion queens three stories tall.

Landlords ask for money. Messengers ride bikes. Poets drape words

around their waists like skirts, hover above subway grates

for the wind to blow them up. Cleaning crews work

unnoticed. Anxious wives buzz in their cells tending the world

wide web, drinking nectar to forget. The hives used to reach the sky.

Children hear stories about how they all fell down.

The elderly are the only ones who believe in Beekeepers

now. Churches fill for funerals and little else. Everyone mourns.

In their beds, lovers cling to the final moments of fatal matings.

Girls with hips and tambourines keep the beat.

Honey drips between their legs.

-Carolee Sherwood      

Used by permission.     

  

Carolee Sherwood is a painter, mixed media artist and poet living in downtown Albany, New York. She has roots in Northern Maine, where she was born and raised, and in West Virginia where she received a degree in journalism. Her training in storytelling and careful observation came at the knee of her writer grandfather, a truck driver with a quick wit. She is raising three bold sons, ages 12, 10 and 8.  

 

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.    

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210 

Call for Poems: The Day After

Deadline: August 2, 2012

On The Issues Magazine, the online magazine of progressive, feminist thinking, seeks poems on the enduring issues and challenges that women and progressives will face, no matter who wins the fall election. Four sub-concerns that define the topic a bit further are:

·       health care and reproductive rights;

·       economic security and parity;

·       peace, safety and security (including international issues, violence against women, civil liberties, LGBTQ rights and concerns, and prisons); and

·       the presentation of women in popular culture.

We welcome poems in all styles, approaching these issues in all sorts of ways.

Please send up to 3 poems (no more than 2 pages each) to Poetry Co-Editor Sarah Browning at ontheissuespoetry@yahoo.com by midnight, August 2, 2012. Please do not send to Sarah’s Split This Rock email.

Guidelines:

 ·       Send the poems in the body of a single email. Attachments will not be opened. If your poem is chosen for publication we will request a copy in Word in order to insure that the formatting is correct.

·       Include a cover note with a 2-3 sentence bio.

·       Previously published in print is acceptable, but not on the web.

·       Simultaneous submissions accepted.

·       We regret that there is no financial compensation.

·       All are invited to submit.

We look forward to seeing your poems!

Sarah Browning

ontheissuespoetry@yahoo.com

www.ontheissuesmagazine.com

Current Issue: 

Poem of the Week: Lauryn Nesbitt

Lauryn Nesbitt: Congo (Spoken Word)

         

   

Congo

For those who have lost their lives during the ongoing genocide in the Congo, as well as the many lives lost in genocides all over the world. Your bloodshed shall and will not be in vain. We will find peace.

As long as you wake up everyday you should have  

no reason to complain, right

i guess if i'm still breathing then i'm not really

suffering

Well if that's the case i'll give every other breath

To the 6 million Congolese people who have died  

fourteen out of my fifteen years of days i don't

complain about

Lived in fear their whole life only to die brutally

and unjustly

Because someone was following orders

Being a law abiding citizen

An unjust law is no law at all

The next time i touch my screen i will say

Madsi Pa

Because someone died for this

Not even given a proper burial

Please do understand that a street corner or

pot-holes in the road do not suffice as coffins

Where is the tombstone

6 million beautiful African names all gone with the

wind now

Somewhere a little girl doesn't understand the

meaning of

You're named after your great great great grand-mother

That the last time this name was written it was with an

X

Now with a signature she has been practicing since

she was seven

Quiet honestly

i don't have to go through triangles or bloody
current to see the redness in mother's eyes because
she cried all night

That monotone pitch her voice is now concealed in
from screaming her child's name

She didn't bother about putting makeup on today

No queen collection can mask her wide-eyed ghost
look

See, i can close my eyes every night and act like it
doesn't exist

Turn my TV off right before the Yele infomercial

Refuse to watch channel 5 because it's day twenty
and there are sixteen bodies and counting

Or hum to that sad music they play on the Food for
America PSA

i can even wish that i could give the little boy on

that feed the children of Africa a tissue for his nose

Missing the whole purpose of why i should call
them and not my best friend because they're both
asking me to spot them a twenty

When you think about it

Suffering is like god

You may not always see it
you may never see it
but it is real and
it's out there.

             

-Lauryn Nesbitt    

Used by permission.     

From Lauryn's chapbook, Disturbing the Piece, 2012. 

  

Lauryn "Poetic Hyst" Nesbitt is a 17 year-old senior in the Literary Media and Communications department at Duke Ellington School for the Arts. She hopes to pursue a career in film production. She has bloomed into a powerful and inspiring slam poet, performing her work at venues such as the Kennedy Center Concert Hall and Millennium Stage, Busboys and Poets, Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, her high school's graduation ceremony for the class of 2011, and the Atlas Theater. Lauryn is a two year member of the DC Youth Slam Team and she recently placed 2nd in the 2012 Larry Neal Writers' Competition teen category. When she's not pressing pen to paper she's your average teenager juggling homework, friends, and family. 

 

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.    

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Poem of the Week: Renée Olander

Photo credit: Helen Jones, 2009

         

   

Rhinos Got No Luck           

Yesterday, a ten-year old newcomer to a zoo
Fought her new mate, broke
Out of her cage, and galumphed
Off zoo grounds, chased by three
Trucks of vets armed
With tranquilizer guns and one rifle--
And what sort of luck was it
That only the kill shot
Between the eyes could calm her?

And there were a pair of rhinos shipped
From Cleveland to China as a gift
Who died on the seventh day of their flatbed
Truck drive in one hundred degrees
Of dehydration. Until the zoo
Can find replacements,
They'll show the stuffed carcasses--
Cheaper than watering rhinos--
And there's profit from the magic
Horns, whose likenesses in wax
Convince from a distance.

And at my local zoo, one of two rhinos
Swallowed a racquetball
Which blocked its intestines,
And it died like dozens do a year--
Or was that the hippos?--
From balls tossed playfully
Into their confines (so maybe
You've even killed one yourself).

I know it sounds crazy,
But why can't I get the dry-mouthed rhinos
On a flatbed in China off my mind?
How they remind me of a little boy
Lost on his bike in the business district
Who asked me once for water
And what was his way home?


-Renée Olander

First appeared in MARGIE:The Journal of American Poetry. The St. Louis Poetry Center: Vol. 2, Fall 2004.  
 

Used by permission.    
  
Renée Ellen Olander is author of A Few Spells (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Verse and Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics, HEArt - Human Equity Through Art, Artword Quarterly, Hawai'i Pacific Review: Best of the Decade, 5AM, The Café Review, 13th Moon, Snake~National~Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education National Poetry Month Blog, and others. Olander's interviews, reviews and essays have appeared in publications including The Writer's Chronicle.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.    

Split This Rock
www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210 

July Sunday Kind Of Love

July Sunday Kind of Love:

A Reading from

Entering the Real World: 

VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo

 

In celebration of the 

40th Anniversary of the 

Virginia Center 

for the Creative Arts 

 

Sunday July 15, 2012

5-7pm 

Busboys and Poets

2021 14th St. NW

Washington, DC

Hosted by Sarah Browning & Katy Richey

$5

As always, open mic follows!

Featuring:

Karren LaLonde Alenier, Ned Balbo, Holly Bass, Becky Gould Gibson, Kim Roberts, Dan Vera, Michele Wolf, and anthology editors Andrea Carter Brown and Margaret B. Ingraham

Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets

&

Split This Rock

For more information:

 www.BusboysandPoets.com

 www.SplitThisRock.org

info@splitthisrock.org   

202-387-POET