~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of June 2025 ~
Tag: Claudia Gary
Atlas by Claudia Gary
Atlas
The world begins to wear
a flat spot into my shoulder.
I carry it by turns with my
writing and nonwriting hand.
Oceans lap at my temples.
Submarine and whale songs
confuse my ear so I
change sides again and shake
a cramp out of one forearm.
My fingers seek mountaintops
to stay away from city traffic,
seek coasts to avoid immersion
except for this one coast
that began to burn my palm.
Closing my eyes and bowing
my head I wonder what
is happening in this story
but can’t yet put it down.
*
Claudia Gary lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, composer of tonal songs and chamber music, and an advisory editor of New Verse Review. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music, and some of her settings, can be found online at https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html. See also pw.org/content/claudia_gary
Kitchen Talk by Claudia Gary
Kitchen Talk
Both born in war’s shadow,
you and I received
different messages.
For me the shade was smaller,
the truth distant. But you
lived among its traces.
Your mother said, “Waste nothing.”
“The last bite,” said your father,
“will always be the best.”
“Finish up your dinner,”
my grandma would say. “Children
are starving now in Europe.”
When I tell you I’m leaving,
you take my vegetables
and place them in your fridge.
We must have a famine
in order to talk.
*
Claudia Gary lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Villanelle, Sonnet, Meter, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Author of Humor Me (2006) and chapbooks including Genetic Revisionism (2019), she is also a health/science writer, visual artist, composer of tonal songs and chamber music, and an advisory editor of New Verse Review. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music is online at https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html. See also pw.org/content/claudia_gary
Two Poems by Claudia Gary
Elegy for Our Own Words
Our words would tumble heavily onto the page
but get up, walk across and back, remembering
our days—unlike the words spelled out by an AI,
their artifice purporting to be human. Ours
contained deep memories of beauty, ugliness,
sensation of all kinds—however awkward—not
the pseudo-elegance proffered by the AI.
We were allowed to fail, revise, begin again,
elucidate, restate quirky humanity.
One day our words no longer dared to walk across
the page, since an AI could always dance around them.
It had soundly sabotaged, then conquered us.
Oh little words, large words, our own words spinning off
into the ether: let’s regenerate our words,
in memory of our selves fashioned out of words.
*
On Being Asked to Pray for You After Your Stroke
“Base 3 [as used in ternary computing] offers the most economical way of representing numbers.”
I told them I would. Will I follow through?
Maybe is not a brokenness
between Yes and No, you’ve said, but a blue
haze that surrounds them. No and Yes
emerge from it, float. So I’ll pray to Maybe,
ask it my questions, ask it to guess
where you are now, what you will see
when the prayer’s over. Leave it to you
to complicate things. Yes/No would agree.
*
Claudia Gary teaches workshops on the Villanelle, the Sonnet, Natural Meter, Freedom With Forms, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center and elsewhere. Author of Humor Me (David Robert Books, 2006) and several chapbooks—most recently Genetic Revisionism (2019)—her poems are internationally published and anthologized. She has been a semifinalist for the Anthony Hecht Prize (Waywiser), a Pushcart Prize nominee, an Honorable Mentionee in the Able Muse book contest, and a three-time finalist in the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Contest. Claudia has chaired panels on Poetry and Music, Poetry and Science, and The Sonnet in 2016, at the West Chester University (Pa.) poetry conference; and on Poetry and Music at the Frost Farm poetry conference. She is also a health journalist, visual artist, and composer of tonal songs and chamber music. Her 2022 article on setting poems to music, based on her presentation at the 2022 ALSCW conference. For more information, see Claudia’s P&W profile; you can follow her at @claudiagary or @claudiagarypoet.