Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

Dawn Marks had two beginnings for me: the image of light through an apartment window at the the end of a sleepless night and the phrase “dawn breaks”. I used the idea of dawn bending instead, at least through glass, as a way to enter the consciousness of someone who had been unable to sleep all night. In my experience, your consciousness shifts (bends) even if no insight into what has you tossing and turning has been achieved, the moment light makes you realize the sun is rising. There’s a sense if not of hopefulness then of moving on, continuing, which I tried to portray in part by ending lines with ampersands.

With Alisha Marie, I began with some of the harassment one of my friends in high school experienced (note: I didn’t use her real name for ethical reasons) and wondered what it would look like if the pain she felt had been placed entirely onto her flesh. Originally, the poem was written without a name, but when it came time to give it a title, I decided to give the character one, since I felt it would help make her relatable. It’s also a continuance of my resistance to namelessness as a default in poetry.

Cul-de-sac is one of my nature poems, addressed essentially to the absurd belief that one can own a tree. Consumer Society is a pearl formed around the irritant of commercials and victim-blaming. It’s harder for me to say much of anything meaningful about Cave of Real (Deep. All I know is that my experiences spelunking made up part of it, there’s a bit about relationships and how much they count for, and at some point I started thinking of it as responding in some way to the allegory of the cave. 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Adolescent Poetry Generator (neatorama.com)
• An Homage / Rebecca is 2009 (rebecca-rosenblum.blogspot.com)
• Its Pink Shirt Day! (makegood.com)

Related posts:

1. Year in Review: Publication

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.