#joan logghe

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Over and Over by Joan Logghe

Marriage isn't a vessel it's salt pouring freely from a clear shaker. It's a row of blue birds on a cedar fence. Suddenly, they lift. Marriage is a great big AHA! You sneeze and I say "Gesundheit." We waltz Sunday monring and the weekdays behave.

Musical as cowbells in Sardinia we married each other twice. Once for the girl I used to be, once for the one I would become. All the time there were uncles dancing. There was a party going on

a festival of lips.

The mountain is cool and distant while you, love, claimed me twice. Once for the man already inside. Once for the place I made for you, a silk garment, bits of wool.

What a chance you take marrying me. I'm a genius at forgetting names. Will you become my Rolodex? I turn over and over all night but you are perfectly free to love me, flawed as I am, to adore my tangled excuses.

I'll give you parrots of light. I'll tattoo the seven chakras on my body so you'll know where I'm coming from. I'll buy you a bicycle, paint it white and tie macaw feathers on the handlebars. I'll climb ladders. I'll change my socks to ones with silver threads for dream walking. I'll even change my way of eating soup.

[coloradopoetjhwriter]

Pick Your Best Poem(s) and Get Them In by May 1st

Pick Your Best Poem(s) and Get Them In by May 1st

For details, visit http://talkinggourds.weebly.com/fischer-prize.html

ALSO NOTE: Colorado poets who enter the Fischer Prize contest are eligible for the $500 Cantor Award.

So … why are you just sitting there?

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FINISHING LINE PRESS BOOK OF THE DAY: Shadow Tongue by Kim Cope Tait $19.99, Full-length, paper https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/shadow-tongue-by-kim-cope-tait/ Kim Cope Tait earned her MFA in Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2000. Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the U.S. and abroad. She has two novels, Inertia and Bend the Blue Sky, as well as a chapbook of poems entitled Element. Kim also wrote and recorded Lotus Wheel: Guided Meditations for Relaxation and Healing in 2013. Having lived in California, Hawaii, Switzerland, New Zealand and Vermont, Kim now lives with her family and teaches in the High Rockies of Colorado. Is it possible to live in a world of loss and continue to sing? Kim Cope Tait‘s beautiful Shadow Tongue teaches us that we can. In this book, pain and tenderness are in a complex dynamic with the wildness of rich poetic language and the composed rigors of poetic form. And what emerges from this complexity? In the poet’s words: “I am not more than I was before, but changed:/swelling with the grief that becomes my love/and is turned back again and again/to what aches, what saves.” –David Ebenbach, author of We Were the People Who Moved and Miss Portland This is what it is to be lit from within. Astral and oceanic, familial and solitary, of measured breath and breadth, these poems attest that in grief, too, there is a deeper plumbing of the now and a radiance to savor, that our experiences of peace and pain are undoubtedly a function of each other’s, a collective happening, and that the act of saying provides the basic physiospiritual infrastructure of knowing and being known, perhaps our greatest human needs. Even in a world-weary era where language is often co-opted, its target-end misinformation, subversion and deception, Kim Cope Tait‘s Shadow Tongue does not waver. Her aim is true. –Bill Rasmovicz, author of Gross Ardor and Idiopaths. “I have a soft spot for form, especially when it blends seamlessly into narrative and song. Kim Cope Tait‘s long-lined sonnets and beyond, are not afraid of the darkness. Throughout the collection the pleasure of form provides the background music to the appreciation of living. This book, a small gem, views life in all its ‘excellence.'” –Joan Logghe, Santa Fe Poet Laureate 2010-12, author of The Singing Bowl (University of New Mexico Press) “People think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts,” wrote Pessoa, and it is precisely such exactness of emotion, which is to say, the power of emotive thinking, that informs Kim Cope Tait‘s poems. Whether through sonnet, sestina, linked sonnets, organic forms, villanelle and others, and encompassing the family, both living and dead, close friends, native tribes, musicians, or a lost boy, and by extension all of us readers, these poems reach out “as we wake / to [their] arc of love’s flight and the precision of trusting what is light.” The observable world here ranges from flowers to constellations, relationships of love to losses that are always, through the power of the language here, redeemed. What lies behind this incredible voice is the dialectic understanding that “it is as likely / that nothing is sacred as that everything is.” And this book is a testament that everything is, or will be, after reading. –Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Out of Place Kim Cope Tait‘s poems keep moving in circles–water, trees, stars; children, mothers, elders; life, loss, persistent haunting. Throughout, it is love and love that keeps these worlds turning and spinning, raveling and unraveling. “Shadow Tongue” wanders the powerful poetic landscapes of Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop and Maxine Kumin–asking us to stand in the maelstrom of who we came from, what they lived, and how these become the world we live in. In the end, despite grief and loss, the poet affirms “Yes, I Say, Yes” leaning heavily into one desire: beauty. –Valerie Martínez, author of Each and Her and Absence, Luminescent PREORDER SHIPS JULY 13, 2018 RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/shadow-tongue-by-kim-cope-tait/ #poetry

[oldladyhaiku]

Poem by the Indomitable Joan Logghe

Poem by the Indomitable Joan Logghe

Written for 100 Thousand Poets for Change reading at Ethyl the Whale

Our Lady of Sorrows Fiesta: Small Things

Even though the world is ending I am fighting off frown lines and even though there is no hope I named my daughter Esperanza and even though I hear the science and the Artic ice calving and pipelines and penguins,

I teach poetry, the least useful most important thing and even though I do…

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By Joan Logghe

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Two Cars Cruising on Two Saturday Nights by Joan Logghe

Marriage looms like immense foreplay for death. I drove fifty miles in the wrong direction, want you. You offer space, think I want vistas more than your head in my lap, anywhere on me, your personal skull. On that acid trip in San Francisco, another Saturday, we rushed to City Lights Books , old Beat slice of pie. I had a date with a mustached man who played guitar. You drove me there like the Eskimo's shared wife. I was still flashing from the drug of you, stepped from our car into an an older model, drove away over the Bay Bridge. The sunset, jealousy free, was Hare Krishna yellow. You went home alone. The musician's mouth tasted of me and curry, while you were the mouth of flowers. I hadn't married, didn't know how long this will you-won't you might last. It's the Haight, the flavor burned out and saddened. Tonight I cruise in a red Subaru. It's rainy, Saturday in June. I'm so alone, Jesus at the corner church in stained glass lit from a light inside, looks sexy. Jupiter, Venus, and Mars triangulate above. I'm all three Marys. I drive past two nostalgias, motorcycles leaned against the drive-in liquor. Two long-haired men squat. Forget the Sixties, I want a western. Your hot body tapping mine. Spurs, horseback, and an oasis called SEX, an expensive hotel. I light the VACANCY sign. I'm prowling the Nineties for the man who said back then, "Be true. Never swap horses in the middle of a stream." We've been the same river cutting a valley. Ride hard. Don't trade love.

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Hover above us. Help do the work that piles up in loads. Give us Sundays of psalms. Do childcare. Be faithful. Rescue the holy from the matrimony.

from "The Angel of Marriage" by Joan Logghe

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Today I was driving into town, crying. I love you more than an enemy. I need you more than city of Chicago needs Lake Michigan. Don't ever die. Don't ever run off... You're always right. I'm also right. We live at right angles in a house of right angles. You built the house, the love is still under construction.

from "Solid as Chocolate" by Joan Logghe

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The bear looking into my eyes from a photograph, has given me nerve to carve my name in you. You will never forget me nor will I lose you. My heart is God's eye and recollects why I came. I bear the world home to our loving. Matchmaking you with my eyes. I want to gaze you back to Eden as I have been Edenized.

from "Eve Marie's Eyes" by Joan Logghe

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Rhyme by Joan Logghe

When blood was pounding in my head and all our friends unmarrying, you and I flew here and there, yet kept the fire from wandering. So far we've kept the faithful part and now the death until us part. Our vows were scant, our vows weren't said our marriage vows came from your head. Our marriage vows came from my fear and rhyming you with me, my dear. My deer, my dear, my dream, my life. I've finally become your wife. I've chosen you as you chose me. Not heavily or lightly. Not permanently, not gracefully. But clumsily and stumbling in, we ended up the next of kin. The rest is hope this moment lies, forever inside your eyes. You've done for me I've done for you. Now faithfully, one becomes two. And two becomes both one and three, we are the truth's dicotomy. We married barely slapped from youth. Now twenty three years in, fidelity has been my sin. Husband, we have learned long love. It's from below as from above.

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The great and frightening thing about being adults is that by now we know we can't save each other.

from "Brevity" by Joan Logghe

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We left. We should have bought it. Your grandma's rhubarb is in a pie on the plate of strangers. They sold that raspberry hillside for a song, for less than singing.

from "Wisconsin Blue Willow" by Joan Logghe

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Marriage became a road map A California we would fold and unfold in our lap, tape at the creases a manageable scale, ten miles to one inch.

from "Cross Country" by Joan Logghe

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The first place was a left hand turn full of opposition, forbidden in the center of the city... Love then was a stranger trying to break in.

from "Cross Country" by Joan Logghe

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Monday Poem by Joan Logghe

Monday Poem by Joan Logghe

Sacred Response   Keep a glass of water near your bed. Who taught me that? To draw the anger out then spill the water into the earth. Put tobacco on the earth after you smoke, he told you, and throw the filter away. I saw the women of Tesuque Pueblo sprinkle corn meal at the corner of the plaza before the dance and after the dance. I saw the drummers at Taos Pow Wow  touch their hands to their…

[oldladyhaiku]

Start The Week Right! Poem by Joan Logghe

Dressing Down for Love   Put on your love dress. Take off your other garments the ones that cost you most. Wear your heart our. Become a transvestite for love. Cross dress as a heart. Establish a municipality with eyes you meet on the street. Enter the election for Darling. Let kindness reign. Put on no airs. Be plain as…