New York

A New Work

This is a collab between myself and the poetry I found from commenters. I asked them to offer them credit. She declined. It was someone I did the workshop with in 2023 that recommitted me to my passion and whom I had my first collaboration with as an adult, so it was a wonderful gift to have the wise brilliant poet-professor still reading and watching me perpetually emerge. I present this as a collab- proving there’s poetry everywhere. Even in Substack comments. Thank you, Professor Muse. A particular sestina still lives rent free in my head 🖤🥳 This also borrows from my mentor’s comment, Angela Yuriko Smith of Authortunities .

Mentorship never stops- it evolves as we grow. These two helped me learn to walk when I didn’t know I already could and was still crawling and let me loose with my wobbly scabby-kneed poems careening around into submission.

Somedays, I can still barely crawl, but I bruise less now. I still fall and fail. I remember their wisdom and I stand back up. One word and then another… thank you.

New York

Honor all rituals, even the rituals of destruction. The rites reveal what truly matters. The objects and rote, the routine, the intention. They reveal the truth of everything we do. Remember all Winter the countless origami poems flung into the East River.

When that river is no longer a solid sheet of sketchy ice - fold newspaper pages of remaindered poetry and mass market paperbacks, the failures of old moleskin notebooks, yellowed Times Square flyers for live sex shows scrawled with aborted villanelles, Met Museum postcard love letters precisely folded into new magical creatures, college literature zines found in closets under staircases in Brooklyn into a flotilla of small paper boats of poetry or filled with image and meaning word refugees that failed to ever reach any asylum shore. Sail the poetry paper boats until they sink and let all the catfish taste their succulent words.

Let there be sonnets fed by calzones and let there be novellos nursed on Sabrett hot dogs with mustard and kraut eaten at the cart, and let their be light verse from skyscraper roof LCD displays, and let there be plays in the borders of off-Broadway playbills, and haikus inked on the centerfolds breasts of 1978 Playboys. Let there be limericks nourished by kasha knishes, let there be bodega cat nibbled chopped cheese epics, let there be Peking Duck sonnets and Battery Park and F train assault and battery chapbooks! May the fish of Manhattan and the five boroughs never lack a thing to read. Fish out new literature creatures from all these cultural riches and cringes.

The fish appreciate the literary offerings. The NYC rivers are brackish, not freshwater, from frustration tears of the writers who believe still. Poetry was once an act of piety, faith and works in NYC. The masses attended readings at St. Marks, a former cathedral in new novena lit voices. A counterculture choir singing modern hymns for the masses. And so many poems folded into New Forms and set adrift to the sea from the walking paths, the Southside Seaport Tourist District, thrown off the boroughs bridges, the paper shapes ultimately passing the overflowing city garbage barges.

The origami animals of the East And Hudson rivers, the Bay, can grow content, full, and fat. A failed sestina can feed an entire school of fish for a week. They appreciate the reads they swim amongst. The schools of fish will become colleges. They will achieve MFAs in modern literature, become littery critics, judge poetry awards and gain superior sentience eventually from tasting decades and decades of all the lost submissions within the next 5-10 years.