Poems from the 12-Hour Sonnet Contest: Wing loading, Frances Boyle

Frances Boyle is a noted Canadian poet and fiction writer. Her first novel comes out from The Porcupine's Quill next week. 

Wing loading

 A hawk’s spare journey, fencepost
to power line, wingspread remembering
all the places she’s been, the nest 
among poplars, the sway of the wind.
The distance she travels in an afternoon
broken by the amethyst sky, clouds
bruised and limping into place 
overhead, the gaps where the light 
shows brilliant in cracks. She hunches 
her head against the ruffling of feathers, 
the unsleeking of her plumage, barbs 
bent transverse to the grain by wind 
and wet. She hover-hops, rights 
herself. What home has she now?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: EASTER POEMS

Looking for poems for an Easter poetry bouquet (online and PDF) to be published April 11, 2025 (the Friday before Palm Sunday). By 11:59 pm EST, March 9, 2025: Send a word doc or pdf with one or more poems to poemsforpoi@gmail.com .  For submissions from the US & Canada/UK, Ireland & Western Europe/Australia & NZ/Japan, S. Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, send $2.50 Canadian for each poem submitted to  poemsforpoi@gmail.com  via PayPal. Submissions from other countries do not require payment. All submissions will receive an answer by April 4, 2025. Guidelines Poems must be the original work of the submitter, unpublished except on personal social media Poems must be NO MORE than 50 lines We are not considering prose poems for this call Separate files for each poem submitted Name your file the title of the poem. DO NOT include your name or other identifying information in the file name or the document Include a short bio (no more than 50 words) in the body of your e...
Read more

Winning Poem, Alliteration Contest: Makers' Marks, Kelly Scott Franklin

Kelly Scott Franklin  has published poems and translations in  Able Muse , Nimrod ,  Literary Matters , Driftwood Press Literary Magazine, Thimble Literary Magazine, National Review, Ekstasis Magazine, Light Poetry Magazine , and elsewhere. His essays and reviews have appeared in C ommonweal, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion , and elsewhere. He is an Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College, and lives in Michigan with his wife and daughters. Makers' Marks -For Kristine I know the brandy freckles and the rum-drop rains dotting the drafts of Edgar Poe, and I can tell a tale of manuscripts so marred by circle stains they might be maps for walking tours of Dante’s hell. I’ve seen Fitzgerald’s proofs, with pale gin rickey rings, the purple laudanum splashes that De Quincey made; I caught that cedar note of whiskey where it clings to every line that Dylan Thomas ever laid. A fleck of red vermouth, a dark negroni drip in notebooks Hemingway br...
Read more

Alliteration Contest Poems: Meeting the ‘hood patrol on my two-wheeled commute, Grant Shimmin

Grant Shimmin is a New Zealand poet born in South Africa. An editor for   Does it Have Pockets? , he has work in journals globally including   Roi Faineant Press ,   Bull ,   The Hooghly Review ,    The   Hemlock Journal ,   Blue Bottle Journal  and   Cool Beans Lit. This poem was previously published in   fussub . Meeting the ‘hood patrol on my two-wheeled commute Wiry and weathered Faux black leather vacuum-sealed around his sparrow limbs The beat from the portable radio penduluming from the crossbar comfortably outpacing his pensive pedalling Grey hair long under the black beanie of a summer not-quite-arrived Mouth smoke-grip puckered advertising a vacancy He rides, watching warily This is his ‘ hood I ’ m just an intruder in transit
Read more

Alliteration Contest Poems: Prayer Breakfast, Michael Helsem

Michael Helsem   was born in Dallas in 1958. Shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky. Prayer Breakfast Alizarin zip back Yaldabaoth creel Xeric dew were Entire vestige fade   Unless grim time Has saved iridescence Respendent jonquil Quisling keyhole paid   Lucky our moment now Not mere oligarch Looms puissant Kriegspiel Quite jolly rodent   I saw heinous Thugs gobble up Fire voracious eaves Woven dire xyster   Culls your barrows Zymurgic America
Read more

Alliteration Contest Poems: Farmhouse Cellar, Steve Knepper

Steve Knepper edits  New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry . Farmhouse Cellar Icicles scale its skin of stone. Its door’s half-dammed             by the drifting floes. Come in now snow child. Kick off your boots. Doze stove-side deep in a dragon’s heat, lulled by the crack             of cordwood aflame down in this vault             where visions flicker, this castoff heap,             this hoarded treasure: the lacquered rack             where deer rifles wait, the ice cream crank,             canister, and bucket, the pumpkin pail,           ...
Read more

Alliteration Contest Poems: Untidy and Simple, Eric Colburn

Eric Colburn 's poetry has appeared in Appalachia , Blue Unicorn , THINK Journal , and elsewhere. He lives with his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Untidy and Simple The vacant lots and leafstrewn alleyways we used to smuggle our small bodies through are nearly gone by now, filled in with new immurements, marked and massed cement, the maze of walls and rules, of laws and loss, that cage us here. What havens have we hurried to, so desperate to escape the past? If you have taken steps toward brighter, newer days, may you yet find your freedom in the wild- ness of the world–while wildness still exists… Some leaves still strew the path. Not every lot has been surveyed, surmised, surcharged. Some child, today, now tiptoes toward some shadowed bliss, now teases out the tightly tangled knot.
Read more

Alliteration Contest Poems: Alberta Prairie Breeze, Stephen Bauhart

Stephen   Bauhart  is a poet, a father, and a PhD student at the University of Calgary. After a twelve year writer's block he's back trying to make it all make sense in verse and rhyme Alberta Prairie Breeze A million million stalks of grass Sway and whisper, bend, and flow, Murmuring ‘round those who pass – Bid they “welcome”?  Bid they “go”? Just walk, my friend – you’ll never know. That murmur’s not for you, my friend – The secrets prairie breezes said, And say and say without an end Will still be whispered when you’re dead, To swaying seas of grass, instead.
Read more

Alliteration Contest Poems: In the Spirit of Bezalel, Liv Ross

Liv Ross is an urban monk, a poet, a storyteller, and a student of Christian spirituality. When she’s not writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, and mischief. In the Spirit of Bezalel I take a breath. I breathe out a flame, for Your flame has been breathed into me. My eyes are on the prize, gazing at the gifts held in these hands rising to the task of creation. Art is born of abundance, and abundant are the ways in which to amend awe into the soil of civilization. It all begins with beauty. Yes, beauty. For you best believe that life and laws have limits when nothing guides our gaze or grips our guts, holds our hearts safe against the world's weather. Beauty lies in the eyes of we who behold it. Daily, we drink of deep drafts like dewdrops and tip out the tenderest of threads - slender, silver spidersilks - woven into the warp and woof of wonder. Consider. Even the carrion crow carries iridescent radiance in a certain slant of light. Or amethyst and gold....
Read more

Alliteration Contest Poems: Courage, Jeffrey Rensch

Jeffrey Rensch  has been writing poetry for 50 years.  Previous poems of his on Poems for Persons of Interest include " Being ,"  " Carol of disarray , " and " Thank you for the shivering ," which won the Thanksgiving Poetry Contest last year. Courage Courage, come when you can. Courage be mine, don’t make me Show you in order to have you. Courage, show at night from nowhere, The last alternative to terror, The only viable thing besides. When there was peace we put Our courage in a drawer and closed it Tight and the key got tossed And the side fused with the desk itself And soon our fingers slipped When we tried to tease it open. We grew afraid of the drawer. In a far metropolis I was mugged. They ran down an alley.  Somehow I Went after my life without a thought And grabbed it.  I was like a thief Myself.  How had I managed it? There was no drawer, only the thought Of losing felt like a death. Courage was nowhere till it was. Only when something else was ...
Read more

Alliteration Contest Poems: The Gardener Mind, Andre Demers

Andre Demers is a poet and fictionist from  the  Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. He enjoys reading long poems for  the  Short Poetry Collection on Librivox.    The Gardener Mind Tonight the sleepless at their windows moan, "How sweet it would be to shed the spectacles Of language, learning it all again with eyes Fresh in the morning when my thoughts may matter, And concepts, that need no words to carry them, Would also leave me unperturbed. Please scatter Over my searching eyes a dreamless sleep, That neither memory or imagination Disturb my practice at the dying thing. Maybe the flashing over of our life Occurs at once, or over all the nights We spend a span in poking through the past In seeming needfulness, whether it be A memory aged a decade or a day." And the wind says, as a sandman singing to us, "The trouble with thought is that its object is Not clearly a free choice, since habit has Begun its bundle of conjunctive choices So very long ago when...
Read more