Tag: letter

Letter to a Diane Seuss sonnet by Susan Vespoli

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Letter to a Diane Seuss sonnet

       ~ a bouts-rimé sonnet, after page 89 of frank: sonnets

Dear sonnet, I am borrowing just this once
your end words. Remember how even oxblood
would icicle in that chemo room (though
Phoenix summer waited outside to sweat-slick our hair
when we exited the elevator)? Which nurse rocked
the AC in that third-floor room of dripping bags? My
gawd. Was it intentional? I needed antifreeze,
not a thin blanket. I shivered like
I was terrified. Flesh rippling into indigo
goosebumps. A xylophone of bones, bunch
of ribs clattering. When C saw me shaking, he opened
his arms and wrapped his entire being around me. I felt it
warm me from the inside. No words. Silent tongue.
He just held me. Torso, shoulders, heart, palm, thumb.

*

Susan Vespoli is a poet from Phoenix, AZ who needs to write to stay sane. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Rattle, Gyroscope Review, and other cool spots. She teaches Wild Writing inspired classes on writers.com and 27powers.org and is the author of four poetry collections. Susan Vespoli – Author, Poet

Mastering the Epistolary Poem: A Workshop with John Sibley Williams

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Mastering the Epistolary Poem
A Workshop with John Sibley Williams

Instructor: John Sibley Williams
Date: Monday, January 26
Time: 11:30am-2:00pm PT / 2:30-5:00pm ET
Please check local times.
Duration: 2.5 hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

Please note: This workshop will be recorded for those unable to attend in real time. The recording will only be distributed to those who sign up for workshop in advance.

>>> Register Here <<<

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About the Workshop:

Epistolary poems, from the Latin “epistula” for “letter,” are, quite literally, poems that read as letters. As poems of direct address, they can be intimate and colloquial or formal and measured. The subject matter can range from philosophical investigation to a declaration of love to a list of errands, and epistles can take any form, from heroic couplets to free verse. In this intensive generative workshop, we will explore the many facets of writing “letter poems” through poetry analysis, active discussion, and a progressively challenging set of 6 writing activities that touch upon both our internal/personal worlds and how we interact with the larger world around us. We will study diverse poems from classic poets such as William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes and contemporary poets such as Victoria Chang, Rebecca Lindenberg, Mai Der Vang, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Melissa Stein to see how they successfully explore relationships, internal reflection, political/cultural struggle, and landscape details by using the direct, evocative form of “letter poetry”.

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About The Workshop Leader:

John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translation from by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review, Poetry Editor at Kelson Books, and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.

For more information about John and his offerings:

https://www.johnsibleywilliams.com/about-1

https://www.johnsibleywilliams.com/upcoming-classes

not a letter to my father by Claire Jean Kim

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not a letter to my father

kremlin was your nickname at work
because of the secrets you kept.
well, they didn’t know the half of it.
the down-low trips to beijing and pyongyang,
the rolls of c-notes you handed mom:
we’ll be rich one day. your husband is going
to be famous. by day, a professor in d.c.
by night, a man of international mystery,
an asian james bond, with the obligatory côterie
of female hangers-on. but it all came
to naught, didn’t it? the machinations
and assignations? except the wreckage; that part
was real. then, poetically, infirmity,
with your second ex-wife and third daughter
guarding your carcass out of spite,
as if anyone, anywhere would want a bite.
yesterday, i looked you up online
and saw you had died.

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Claire Jean Kim is on the faculty at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on racial justice and human-animal studies. She is the author of three award-winning scholarly books. She began writing poetry in 2021, and her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in Rising Phoenix Review, Terrain.org, Tiger Moth Review, Anthropocene, Bracken, The Ilanot Review, Ghost City Review, The Summerset Review, Great River Review, TriQuarterly, Anacapa Review, The Lincoln Review, Arc Poetry, Pinch, The American Poetry Journal, North American Review, The Indianapolis Review, and The Missouri Review. The Lincoln Review nominated her poem “Things to do on a Fullbright fellowship in Japan” for Best of the Net in 2025. Terrain.org nominated her poem “Mastodon” for the Best New Poets anthology in 2024. The Missouri Review featured her poem “Amsterdam” as a “Poem of the Week” in January 2025.

Four Poems by Whitney Waters

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Extraterrestrial

June bugs swarm the grass like a platoon
of drunk helicopters. Metallic jade,
oil slick. When their bodies ricochet
from my forehead, my chest, they fly
on as if we didn’t touch, as if one being
is the same as the next, all one swirling
cacophony. Alien ship, alien skin.
How unburdened they are
in flight. Behind the wing
of my shoulder, a recurring pinch, knife
that slices clean to the other side
some days. My only relief is for my love
to dig his thumb into the edge of the blade,
one pain alleviating the other. The muscle’s slide
and recoil. How badly we want to be pressed
into where it most hurts.
                                               Most days I cry
at little things— the Olympics, podcasts,
pop songs, the fact that night comes
on earlier and earlier as August closes.
I watch the women’s marathon—hours
of arms and limbs shimmering with effort
and elation—and when one woman bursts
forth in the last minute, dodges
the elbow, breaks the tape, I think
this is what it means to disregard
pain for flight, and I’m all teary as if
I’m the one who’s won something. Here
is my body— common, earthbound.
This world is abundant in disaster.
Drape me in iridescence. Make me that green.

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Letter to the Daughter I Don’t Have

I don’t want you afraid of this world. I don’t want you to fear men or copperhead bites or AK 47s or dark parking garages or cancer. I don’t want you careful. I want the bad things of the world to ricochet off you like you’re made of steel. I don’t want you made of steel. I want you riverwater. I want you sunny 70 degree days. I want you oceans and orcas and hawksbill turtles and red wolves. I want you feeding the sea turtles salad. I want you reveling fresh-picked blackberries. I want you swimming through coral reefs and florescent blue fish. Did you know more than 90% of coral reefs are expected to die in my lifetime? I want you to call out of work to watch ducks dive and reemerge. I want you to quit your job. I want you to have truly great sex. I don’t want you to know you’ll never exist. That you had a chance to exist, but I eliminated it. Or how many other animals soon won’t exist. This is not an apology. Forgive me. I don’t want you small and fragile. I don’t want you suckling or tottering. I don’t want the bulbous belly, my skin pulled taught over your own. The morning sickness. My insides tearing open. The sleepless nights. The heavy breasts. I like my breasts as they are, small pale slopes. I want you to know you have a name, a secret name I call you in my head. And perhaps, I want you to tell me that it isn’t scary not to exist. That it’s not dark there.

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My mother would have loved feeding you her deviled eggs

and you would have loved eating them— southern style,
insides milky buttercups sprinkled with paprika, cradled
in her handmade blue ceramic platter— how proud

she was of that platter, how it matched her kitchen.
She would have delighted at how many you scarfed down,
would send you home with all the leftovers—

potato cheese casserole, country ham and biscuits, asked
what can I fix you and you sure you had enough? She’d refill
your glass with anything you wanted, sweet tea,

whiskey, wine. My mother would have loved your appetite
for southern cooking, for butter and meat, everything her daughter
did not would not touch. She would not have to ask what can I make

that you’ll eat, because you would gladly eat everything
she heaped on your plate. She would have said so tall
so handsome those shoulders why didn’t you bring

this one home sooner? Sooner—the word that echoes back
at me, and I want to answer, longer. Let’s stay out here longer—
we’ll sit on the back porch in the suspended evening,

the hummingbirds will sip sweet nectar, the magnolias
will bloom, the September sky will be blameless.
My plate, still full. I’ve asked for too much.

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Resourceful Woman

         She is also just a very good, plain, resourceful woman.
         – Sylvia Plath on “Lady Lazarus”

My mother was on the cusp
of forty, and I was ten when
I found her lying stiff
on the bed in the light
of the lampshade,
her featureless face, fine-lined, teeth
straight and full of fillings, vomit-stained
white bowl and bottle of pills
on the nightstand, her chest, rounded
and hard as a seashell—

I did not call
anyone.

I snapped shut,
crept back down
the carpeted stairs.
My father called her sister
and I overheard
an accident.

There was no spectacle,
just murmurings. I’m certain
he never knew I knew.

How many times had it been?

Married to her high school sweetheart,
the quarterback, did she feel trapped
as pearls clasped around her slender
neck? The girl in her yearbook,
a smiling, identical woman
in a cheerleading uniform.

She didn’t manage it—

not that time. And two decades later,
I’m sure it was an accident
of the heart. The machine that forgot
to beat for her. She was asleep and stayed
that way. This time, she meant to sleep.
No theatrics. No comeback.

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Whitney Waters is a poet and educator living in Asheville, NC. She teaches writing at Western Carolina University and teaches workshops through the Great Smokies Writing Program. Her poems have been published in Penumbra, The Shore, About Place Journal, Twelve Mile Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. You can find her on Instagram @whitneywaters.poet.

Two Poems by Sean Webb

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It is Snowing. My Country is Dying.

Those are two states of things
among countless states occurring
at once. Trees stand stripped.

All insects dead or dormant.
People hustle through deepening
snow accumulating in Love Park.

Up the street, the Liberty Bell sits
behind unbreakable glass. The shops
on Jewelers Row are closing down.

I want to believe we are wrapped
in a chrysalis; some coming spring
we will unfold into better selves.

Meanwhile, unseen overhead,
an asteroid named Akhmatova
drifts silently through the void.

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Letter to the Doomed

Riding a train over the Schuylkill river
tilting a bottle to my lips
I am a body of water
drinking water over a body of water.

There is nothing but temporality in that.

I hope at the end
I have enough willing personal energy,
enough functioning body systems, enough
spiritual accord with a grand internal acceptance
of all vaguely understandable universal systems
to defy my inherent fear,
that I might find the power of perambulation
to carry myself out to an open sea, tundra, plateau,
whatever cycling biome is nearby
to find beautiful the relentlessly tangled
wilderness and give my solitary self to the rigors
of death and the continuing struggle
of countless enduring life forms that will
propagate from the end of my being.

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Sean Webb has received many honors for his work. Most recently, he won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Prize for Poetry, the Asheville Poetry Review William Matthews Poetry Prize, the Gemini Magazine Poetry Open, and was a finalist for the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a past Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, december magazine, The Seattle Review, Nimrod, and two chapbooks, What Cannot Stay Small Forever and The Constant Parades. He currently lives in Wilkes-Barre with his wife, the artist Colleen Quinn. More information can be found at seanwebbpoetry.com.

Three Poems by Lynne Knight

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Poem for My Daughter

The past is a country of windows.
In some of them, faces, their histories
sealed by glass. In others,
white curtains. Shadows without name.
Better to create your own history
out of longing and desire
than to mourn the loss of unknown
faces in the photographs your father left
to you. Better to take loss as part of
memory, that long wind blowing past you
with what’s retrievable, or not.
Remember all the times it snowed so hard
the apple tree would vanish
from your window? Yet it was there.
So with my love. His death. His love.
Keep sight of what’s essential.
How, even in the worst storms,
green and blossom travel from the roots.

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Shifting

A friend says not to focus on the negative
           all the time. Open your eyes to the good,
she tells me on the phone, when my husband

calls out that there’s a dead rabbit
           under the deck, having lifted boards
to find out why the sliding glass doors

on the patio won’t close—not because
           of the dead rabbit, whose good-luck foot
lies there, all that’s left besides the rib cage

with its beautiful architecture, the fine spine.
           A joist has settled, or the piling under it,
evidence that things are always shifting,

nothing is static, not even grief or love.
           Nothing’s static but death, my friend says when
I call back with news of the rabbit. At least

once all the decomposing stops. I think of all
           the words I’ve written, or spoken, or thought.
Even the saved ones are shifting: a blessing

is not what it was when I was a kid and it came
           directly from God. Now it can come from rain,
or the wind, or a child’s sigh as she sleeps.

*

Letter I Should Have Written Years Ago

Neither of you has any idea of the pain ahead.
She’s almost seven, and earlier she cried

because you pulled her front loose tooth,
only your big hand got the other one,

too, the one that wasn’t even loose.
She had to change her shirt for the photo,

it was so bloody. But she’s smiling now,
happy she can sing the song, get a double

visit from the tooth fairy. You’re looking down,
contrite, maybe, or just trying not to laugh.

I’ve never stopped loving her, but when I saw
this old photo, I remembered how I loved you

then, loved your strong, star-athlete body,
the way it wanted me. Before the pain

of seeing how unsuited we were for each other.
I don’t remember when it first began, the falling

out, but no hint of it here. Summer, your skin
beautifully tanned, warm light even inside

the house before those long dark winters.
Forgive me for forgetting who we were then.

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Lynne Knight has published six full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks. Although she lived in the United States for most of her life, she now lives on Vancouver Island.