A cross-country, exquisite corpse by thirteen regional poet laureate fellows from our 2021-2022 cohort examining the role of a laureate in community.
Always a shift in definitions:
auteur author into community worker,
not we are here to hear your voice
but are here to give us voice
(we seem to have mislaid it on the way
to society, did you bring a flashlight?)
Call it impropriety — we aim to misbehave.
To remind you all your money is no remedy
for the grave.
Preface — Brian Sonia-Wallace
West Hollywood, CA
A Poet Laureate is
a servant's heart
on a stark canvas
of parchment. The role
is honey in the mouth and bitter
in the belly. We are an unfolding
scroll of judgment
pronounced
in sacred tones.
Andrea Sanderson
San Antonio, TX
Laureate of faith found her—
ancient stone under the moon
without breath — wind abandoned
in her core fossilized poems recall
words hemorrhaging forests
Semaj Brown
Flint City, MI
I was taught: heart
with mind speaks truth. Dark-
bright, bright-dark,
& the infinite sheen
of the in-between. Who
am I, are you, to lift
our voice?
With calloused hands
& histories we carry each
other. We honor our dead. We gather
& plant the seeds, hoping to bend
time to a softer curve.
Luisa A. Igloria
Virginia
copper leaves sit upon a neighboring tin roof
and I can’t help but believe these too
are a lesson in speaking of sooth
creation to nature
to observation
to writing it down
to a poem it becomes
the writer's blood filling with warmth
to have created and continued
to have lived with bronze sights
on a frozen morning
Georgina Marie
Lake County, CA
Or in populous cities:
The varied carols—where in poems,
Singing voices speak,
Speaking voices sing.
Lloyd Schwartz
Somerville, MA
I was taught to gather
Only what belonged to me
To never pick wildflowers
But instead commit
To memory the shape
And sound of what they
Shelter, painted lady
Bumblebee, when I say
Speak poetry—
I mean know the language
Of wild and fragile things
Speak of flight and firelight
How to measure a wingspan
A lifespan, a split second
That changes everything
Carry each other
The poet says, this matters
More than anything
Aileen Cassinetto
San Mateo County, CA
To not be
wind wear, but to let
the air guide you...
Marcus Amaker
Charleston, SC
To make sacred our sadness
Unveiled into triumphs of story
Magdalena Gomez
Springfield, MA
This unfolding
This cultural conjuring
This exercise in ritual
The poet does not write, the poet sings
Bobby LeFebre
Colorado
The poet whose right to song
under-rings and overhears,
conjures covens, translates, conjugation,
folds into the public soil,
rocks out again
Melissa Kwasny
Montana
Smooth and jagged crumbs of earth
Planted and strewn, surprising the toes of giants
Leveling giants to ground-level truths
Poets, reclined into the landscape
clapping dirt and ink from their hands
Dasha Kelly Hamilton
Wisconsin and Milwaukee
ridding themselves of illusions and excess
Red clay makes fertile soil
for growing imaginations and generations.
Poets tend society’s gardens.
Nurturing seeds, plucking weeds.
Chasity Gunn
Elgin, IL
