Tag Archives: Nightmares of the Minor Poet

Eyes Fastened with Poems by Lois Marie Harrod

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Made thing, mad thing
mud and muddied thing—
how hard the poem works

shaping its ship of clay,
what is there to discover?
Sails aghast

but still trying
to suck life
into the little vessel,

shale becomes slate.
Well, take up your chalk
and walk.

—

Lois Marie Harrod’s 17th collection Woman was published by Blue Lyra in February 2020. Her Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton. Links to her online work www.loismarieharrod.org

 

“The Unloved Universe, There and Not” by Lois Marie Harrod

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The deaf make so much noise,
the blind keep appearing,
those who can’t smell
reek while the tasteless
devour the rotten peach.
Those who can’t touch
skim their fingers
along the razor,
or rubbing up against us
in the street, refuse
rebuke. We hurt others,
ourselves,
the non-sensed sensing.
And yet what we can’t touch
sometimes touches us.                            
What we can’t under-
stand often crushes.
—
Lois Marie Harrod’s 16th and most recent collection Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks. And She Took the Heart  (Casa de Cinco Hermanas) appeared in January 2016, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State). Dodge poet and 3-time recipient of a New Jersey Council on the Arts fellowship, she is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3 Links to her online work at www.loismarieharrod.org

It’s Not Simple, the Heart— by Lois Marie Harrod

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artery-fisted, three-pronged aorta
with its middle finger twisted up

yours and better be. Brachiocephaliac
to the right, left common carotid in the middle,

and left, the left subclavian: the blood-draggled glove
of a penniless troll, the knot

of a neglected vegetable, fennel, celeriac,
but the heart always left, left behind,

left below, and common, that too,
the neck, the head, and left again,

and yet it keeps on beating, who could guess?
Drum and drum skin, thick stick, complicit.

The complicated heart because complexity’s simpler
than simplicity? Think Bach:

his great heart with mitral and aortic valves all throbbing,
oh who loves him more than I, this year

when no one is performing Brandenburgs in public,
nothing now but the sound of the recorded heart,

played to calm an infant, sound’s knotted beauty,
septum, septum, do you not love the septum,

the separation, the beat between the beats,
dirt clot and fairy tubules, clenched face of an infant

dismissing what fed him, the ventricles, the valves
the Greeks thought we think with the heart?

The heart’s a hollow muscle.
Some days I want to think with mine too.

—

Lois Marie Harrod’s 16th collection Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016. Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis and How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth, in 2013.  Widely published in journals and online, she teaches Creative Writing at TCNJ. Visit her website: www.loismarieharrod.org