My poem “From The Front Porch” is now live in the spring issue of IthacaLit
along with the other finalists in the 2018 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit
Poetry Prize (which I won in 2016). I am thrilled and honoured to appear again
in this gorgeous journal. My deep thanks to editor Michele Lesko!
PS – If you go to the Home page, where she introduces the issue and poets,
there’s an opportunity to click on my picture to indicate a “like” in the shape
of a heart. But only if you like it!
I’m happy to report I have 6 haiku and an ekphrastic poem, inspired by Lenore Conacher’s painting “Busy Time”, now up at The Zen Space. As you scroll through the Spring 2019 Showcase for my poems, please allow the other poems and photographs to take you somewhere quite wonderful… My deep thanks to editor Daniel Paul Marshall for asking for a few nutshells.
The river behind the house at night
has so much more of a voice
in the darkness, rushing
toward the ends of the earth as if
this is the journey of all journeys.
The world I was born into has hurried
me through forty-seven years, never
stopping to place me where I belong:
I want to lie firm and wondrous in the arms
of the river, a boulder of great faith.
Then when it hands me the moon
shimmering and full, and gathers
the rippling stars in close, I am part
of a circle of sisters, sharing stories,
named in their alphabet of light.
Ask me then about ecstasy,
and I will say it runs gleaming
through the secret universe
of my body, that it calls me
home.
An older poem, first published in North Shore Magazine, and included in my first chapbook “Stealing Eternity”. And since its writing, happy to say I found where I belong.
who loves it more than sunshine,
the streets so wet tonight, they are tongues
babbling in the dark—glossolalia—
they gleam baptismal, it’s like
the slosh of good wine in the mouth,
how many ways can it be praised? and
how auspicious!—easier to leave the house
he was born in twenty-one years earlier
when drop by drop it taps on every window
calling his name, and out he goes for a walk
(like having a bath sprinkled with Dead
Sea salts, he can’t help but wallow in it)
such a glad soak, hair dripping, shoes
squishing already reaching the corner
and look, the light is with him,
the interminable traffic has stopped,
the next step beckons—that wide avenue
known to swallow a man whole—
now’s when a mother crosses
her fingers—momentum will carry him
curb after curb walking on water like this.
This poem was first published in the Taos Journal of Poetry & Art in 2017 and is included in my chapbook “Irresistible”, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in March. Copies are available for preorder here.
Lynne Burnett 