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, The Thread is celebrating Poetry Fridays. Each Friday in April, we will publish a selection of poetry from local independent publishing houses Coffee House Press, Graywolf Press and Milkweed Editions.

Week one

Week two

Week three

Today's selections come from Analicia Sotelo, Tom Sleigh and Kelly Forsythe.


First, you must feel that no one could love you ever.


Let the feeling become a veil of black paper. 


Make the mache into marionette monsters. 


Make the monsters fall in love and scold them


           when they disappear down the hallway. 


         with muscles, horns, and hooves, 


         make a face like you ate something tart, 


The book you are reading is about a girl who rejects a god. 


The book you are reading is about a girl no one believes. 


Consider loving a clever man with a multisyllabic name, 


         like Sophocles, Socrates, Thucydides— 


         all soft at the edges and likely


to appreciate your stretches of languorous study. 


You are at a drama festival in a sundress, eating honey cake. 


Grow up even more, to the point where nothing fits. 


Call a young doctor to help diagnose the problem. 


Take it with egg white and saffron after a night dream. 


Do you trust him? No, but everyone has left you


         to take in the country air. 


Three nights later, you see him again— 


         his tall, crepuscular body separates itself from the lilies. 


And you realize the body is not grotesque—that it is, in fact, 


         like a bolt of fine batiste gathered in your hand, 


         but first you must give up


         a willingness to be right about the world. 


because your mother chose love and look where it left her. 

Whatever you do, there are rockets falling, 


Trees grow up where there once were people, weeds

take over beds of lettuces and coddled flowers, 


uprearing mole hills unpopulate the fields. 

The bricked-in hours of the human have all been knocked down. 

No one lingers at lipstick counters, no one


stares into a screen to escape the digital mayhem

of heroes hurdling over the heads of monsters. 

The old bones on the mountain that stand upright 


and shake when winds blow up from the shore, 

now dangle in the void of an unknown dimension. 

Feels like daytime on my muscles; early teen, quite thin. 


pulled smoke near until I breathed it. I really breathed it, & you. 


Our place in the theater is overgrown & petals are falling off


down the aisles: it looks like a gun just happened in the movie. 


Your gun a ghost silhouetted on a screen & played out in slow


I hit the floor heavy with thorns; crawl on my palms collecting


tiny spikes—so small my palms, tendons sharp and cut up. 


Right behind, you're grabbing my leg & pressing your cheek to


let this happen. I hope always—my hands are brittle flowers, 

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Tracy Mumford

Author

To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Thread is showcasing three poems from local independent publishing houses every Friday.

Poetry Friday: Three doses

Go Deeper.

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