The Longest Nights

Constance Cooper

In Constance Cooper’s “The Longest Nights” the reader is swept away by the exuberant gallop of the narrator’s meter and rhyme on a pilgrimage from pole to pole, always seeking the “winter countries” and fleeing the spring as the seasons change.  Cooper is a master of rhyming forms, and like the snow and other artifacts of winter, this poem’s images are delicate yet strong (“rivers shelled with ice”). 

The Descent of the Corn-Queen of the Midwest

Catherynne M. Valente

Valente’s poem begs comparison with her Oracles series, in which an ancient archetype finds a home in modern America.  "Descent" examines a contemporary Persephone venturing into a Midwestern underworld – “a place I know in Ohio.”  Here images of the ancient-seeming dead are wedded with that of a modern Acheron: a polluted river burning, “boiling into gasoline.”  The whispered chorus – “Don’t you know these are your fruits?/Don’t you know these are your flowers?” – is hypnotic.

Stephanos

C.S. MacCath

In this take on the story of Prometheus and his woes, MacCath calls on Prometheus, the Stephanos of the title, and anyone listening to free themselves – “Use your slender, clever fingers/To steal your life back” – from the torments that their talents and nature have brought them to.  An interesting, personal take on a seminal myth.

Death and the Miser

-- Hieronymus Bosch

A.D. Eldritch

You know what I love about the internet?  Besides the fact that it’s made of tubes?  Poems based on paintings and Google Image Search!  

In Eldritch’s poem the titular miser of Bosch’s allegorical painting ruminates at his last hour – should he follow the familiar, “iniquitous imps” into Hell, or listen to the “nameless angel” at his shoulder, offering a last-minute vision of salvation?  The images here are rich and appropriately painterly, and build towards the narrator’s ultimate choice with the inevitability of his own human frailty.

Wintertime Loves

Sonya Taaffe

The seasonal theme of "The Longest Nights" is picked up in Sonya’s Taaffe’s "Wintertime Loves," a dark and cautionary poem that tells us – warns us, perhaps -- that “You can tell the ones whom winter loves.”  Winter’s beloved girls and boys are beautiful and compelling and dangerous -- and often doomed, because in the mirrored second half of the poem Taaffe reminds us that “you can tell too the ones whom winter has abandoned.” 

Termination Shock, Voyager

Ann K Schwader

Schwader’s poem reflects upon Voyager, carrying “A bit of all/we are,” passing beyond the influence of our sun into what must remain (to us at least) largely unknown. 

From the Oort Cloud

Deborah P. Kolodji, oino sakaim, Teri Santitoro, Mary Margaret Serpento and ushi

This collaborative renga clusters around the Oort Cloud, the source of the solar system’s comets.  Like comets, the verses orbit about the theme, some crossing paths, others on their own lonely passages.

Dragons Complaining, Overhead

Suzette Haden Elgin

Suzette Haden Elgin gives us a clever quintet of haiku regarding the outrage of dragons who try repeatedly to communicate with the human race but are rebuffed.  The overall effect is humorous, but leaves the reader with a strong sense of the missed opportunity of “A dragon chorus/dismissed.”

Trapped Words

Anna Tambour

Because “Some words need more than pity,” Tambour deconstructs them, cooks them down, takes them apart and makes them mean things one never expected.  It’s a poem that could only arise out of a pure love of words and their components. 

Cobwebs in Heaven

Ian Watson

In Watson’s poem, God’s Wife invents the rest of the Universe while the Creator busies himself only with the Earth, and he’s unreasonably jealous.  She doesn’t seem to lose much by the resultant split – one can only feel sorry for all those angels.

Africa Screams

Mikal Trimm

Another classically metered and rhymed poem that plays with the tropes of its genre, Trimm’s "Africa Screams" is a Kipling-esque tale of a Great White Hunter who goes in search of “the dreaded Scarlet Ape” in the heart of darkest Africa. 

muscle boy

Michael A. Arnzen

At the end of "muscle boy" I’m uncertain if the titular character is supposed to be a cyborg or a Real Boy – but essentially it doesn’t matter, as the subject is cruelty, and the torment of what is different.

letter from newton to his mother

John Peery

Newton’s mother essentially abandoned him at the age of two years, which speaks to the impassioned pain and love twisted together in Peery’s poem.  This Newton, as his mother lies dying, searches for a “proof for love” but cannot find it buried beneath his gravitational proofs.

The Minotaur's Last Letter to his Mother

JoSelle Vanderhooft

Picking up the theme of maternal abandonment, Vanderhooft imagines the Minotaur alone in his maze except for his victims (“I eat their sons to hurt you”), writing letters that are neither read nor answered.  This is a stunning meditation on where hatred and cruelty come from, and one sympathizes with the beast who is doomed to destroy and be destroyed.