Thanks to a workshop with David St. John, I heard about a poet who is currently his student at USC. Essy Stone’s book, What It Done to Us, is a group of gripping, tough poems that seem to be written by someone who came up hard and made something of it.
Here’s a sample. Reading it, I wondered if the title came from the Tracy Chapman song, but perhaps not.
Fast Car
At 15, you are skinny & never loved enough,
with the loss of it burning you up & pounding
between your ribs like your daddy’s heavy footsteps
as he comes up on your door. You bite holes
in the sleeves of a hand-me-down homeschooler’s sweatshirt
to sate this hunger, but it don’t fill you,
a little outsider in a brown land—brown without end,
full of brown horses & cattle & trees, the houses wooden
& their tin roofs rusted the same orange-brown
as the clay & the sunburnt skin of the people who live here,
while you try, oh, desperately, to coax something green
into being, to make a thing as green & new as yourself,
or if not green, if not alive, then shiny & mechanical
& humming along fast like your mama’s Singer, Continue reading “Essy Stone”
You may not be able to go out and pick greens from your garden, but any greens will do. In my case I picked baby broccolini and my only two asparagus stalks, sautéed onions and garlic, added herbs, and fried an egg on top with a little cheddar cheese. For crunch I used a little leftover brown rice. To get the egg to set before the vegetables burn, I just cover the pan for a minute or two. 
At a workshop this weekend someone brought this poem, by Lynn Emanuel, and I remembered how much I like her work.
I’m still reading Bullets into Bells, the anthology about gun violence. It’s a remarkable collection. On Saturday we had a local town hall to follow up on the students’ march against gun violence. I realized we think about it almost entirely in terms of the mass events–but every gun death creates a circle of trauma, as this poem explores.
This morning I made fried potatoes for breakfast. The potatoes had been in the ground the day before, and I used hand- rendered beef tallow mixed with a little bacon grease for the cooking fat. I cooked the onions and garlic separately.
It’s like Christmas morning when new chicks arrive. I ordered a new breed, called Cukoo Bluebars, in February, and Tuesday morning, five baby chicks arrived, shipped USPS overnight from Ohio.
This poem is from