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Every morning you'd think
all the moths would throw themselves
into the Sun.
But they wait
for streetlights
to consume them
in small coughs
of sparkle.
My dear,
my dear,
my dear:
I have stopped
listening to my moth soul.
My dear, I am done
tilting at streetlights.
My paper wings soar,
brush
your blazing heart.
Copyright © 2006 by Matt Mason. From Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know (The Backwaters Press, 2006). Used with the permission of the poet.
Inspired by our 2021–22 cohort, sixteen regional poet laureate fellows from our 2022–23 cohort composed another exquisite corpse examining the role of a laureate in the community. Each laureate fellow received only what the poet before them had written and had to write a stanza responding to that. The starting questions were: What is a poet laureate? What does one do?
“Oh, we had an intruder alert,”
said my fourth grade daughter
when I asked how school was.
She said this
after the usual shoulder shrug and mumble.
My kindergarten daughter sang in, “Yeah,
we did.”
It probably started
in a whisper, a murmur,
a low tone hardly caught by the papers,
a sticker, a poster,
a brick wall with slogans in fresh, black paint
because
it probably started with a shove,
some bluster, a gunshot,
crushed fingers, it probably started