Lingerpost – January 2013

Lingerpost offers a fruit salad of poetry (some long, some round, some sweet, and some are fun to utter out loud—like kumquat or papaya) and accepts a wide variety so long as it, as the editors say, is “interesting.” Well, there is certainly a lot of interesting poems in this collection, in several different forms.

Lingerpost offers a fruit salad of poetry (some long, some round, some sweet, and some are fun to utter out loud—like kumquat or papaya) and accepts a wide variety so long as it, as the editors say, is “interesting.” Well, there is certainly a lot of interesting poems in this collection, in several different forms.

Wendy Wisner’s two pieces are reminiscent of her father leaving when she was a child and how she reflects on her sister, who was too young to know what was going on:

                    I loved
how shells sucked
against me, song of the dead
animal in my ear. I fell
for that suction, slurped up
that soulful humming, knocked
and nestled in those
chilly hollows. The baby
was also a shell, stuck
to my mother, clammy
with sleep and hunger.
But she had sailed here
by a different storm, clinging
to the waves of a different sea.

Robert Annis’s “I’ve Never Spied Into this Room Before,” is a short and pensive poem. The speaker is out to throw away trash and peaks into a neighbor’s window where a “she” is kneeling beside the bed, praying. And the meaning is found within the last couple of stanzas:

                                 She chews

and gnaws little words
like a teething infant given a carrot,

tiny miniscule words
that only God can lip-read.

And even he is struggling.

Danielle Hanson contributes several poems, two of which are quite playful. The speaker in “The Affect of Rip Van Winkle on His Neighbors” blames Rip for her lost sleep: “Over the years I visited Rip several times—glaring at him for hours, putting bugs into his snoring mouth, kicking and prodding him, anything to wake him so that I could grab my sleep and run.” And in her next poem, “The bat discovered in England 10 years after her species was declared extinct talks to the press.” It starts, “Today I am a sparrow. Tomorrow I may be a squirrel. The day after possibly a dog.”

Also in this issue are poems by Mark Decarteret, Kevin McLellan, Mercedes Lawry, Howie Good, Chris Crittenden, and Aimee Herman. There is certainly a lot of poetry and poets to choose from, so go ahead, eat up.
[lingerpost.org]