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Brevity – March 2013

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Issue 7

March 2013

Triannual Image

Kirsten McIlvenna

Brevity Poetry Review publishes—what should be obvious from the title—short poems, all coming in at under 30 lines. Each issue puts forth just 10 of these short poems, giving more weight to each one. And this issue contains no mediocre poems; they are all worth reading.

Brevity Poetry Review publishes—what should be obvious from the title—short poems, all coming in at under 30 lines. Each issue puts forth just 10 of these short poems, giving more weight to each one. And this issue contains no mediocre poems; they are all worth reading.

Hugo Esteban Rodriguez Castñeda opens the issue with “Leaving Sodom,” about looking back at the place the narrator has left:

The deserter does not turn
into a pillar of salt—only his skin

shivers a little as he looks back
through the watery gates

Phillip A. Ellis’s “The Australian Dream” speaks of a couple, hands clasped, lying motionless as they soak up the hot sun: “. . . they recline, / slowly with skin that burns / rich golden-brown.” Donal Mahoney’s poem is a short observation piece about a Chinese Laundromat in Chicago where, behind the draperies are three women, “glistening black, / bending, grabbing, sorting.”

“Pieces of Light” is enchanting. Before the poem starts, Carey Taylor gives a quote from American Academy of Family Physicians: “The brain MRI scan is the most useful test for confirming the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. MS lesions appear as areas of high signal, predominantly in the cerebral white matter or spinal cord.” The first and last stanzas both begin by referring to how it started “so simply.” Here is the last:

It started so simply,
a leg that didn’t work
then two, so she came on four
with lovelies from her garden.

The other featured poets include Saheli Khastagir, Linda Ledford-Miller, Darren Damarree, Darrell Petska, Wendy Freborg, and S. D. Mott.
[http://brevitymag.com/]

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