Slope

...I'm always pleased when I turn up a nice new online journal:
http://www.slope.org/21%20poetry%20bolster.html

Stephanie Bolster poems:

Ubiquitous in this domain

The pygmy hippo comes with lettuce.
Polar bear with a red ball, everything
with pigeons. The smaller, indoor animal

draws back as though admitting you
to a parlour, walls painted into the distance
of where it might have lived.

Africa’s the height of popularity,
strollers dripping ice cream and mustard.

In Paris, Chicago, Barcelona, the paddock
for giraffes is just like this. There are things
of which it can be said that no such things exist.*

*Alexius Meinong


Peacock

The world in a tail, that’s what
we came for. The swirl of oil spilled in a lot
one June night outside the cinema.
Just past sunset, what the day was
flashes up, purpled with what
some wince at as regret.
The call erodes the throat
of the listener. What lack! The tail unfolds
its devastation: many eyes emblazoned
turquoise, emerald, witness
our disregard for each thing other
than their beauty. Our eyes dilate
to the backs of mirrors.



Changing Room

The same grated drain.
Where girls don’t look away
and let their mouths drop to gapes
or laughs, a curtain hangs its plastic strips
for the visitor to part. The animal is washed.
Instead of lockers for the towels
the mothers folded, a trough.
The door with its bolt. A daily bar of light
across the back’s shellac.
To refresh, a whiff of bleach.
Girls wait for their mothers, wrung suits
damp in their bags, still in the room
in which their mothers still live.


Jardin des Plantes, Winter

Where in the garden
is the garden? Rain

pools in the gravel
paths. Sculptures

of the eminent,
teary with mildew.

No one here.
This is the heart

of old Paris. Once
the outskirts. A labyrinth

and a vertical installation
through which sand does not

move. In spring, a carousel
of poppies will ruin it with joy.


...such good nouns here. Always show your nouns some love. Seriously--take a compelling poem or two & underline all of the nouns (the same could be done with verbs.) 999/1000 times, the nouns will be surprising & compelling. Work your vocab--take a word or two you're not comfortable with, and make yourself comfortable with it. Wedge yourself firmly into the new.

Dani