Special FeaturerbdTara Jayakar, poetry, special feature

Tara Jayakar: What Use to the Living

Special FeaturerbdTara Jayakar, poetry, special feature
Tara Jayakar: What Use to the Living

devotional where we are falling forever

 

a fungus is wiping out brooklyn’s

oak trees through sudden

 

dehydration. Oak Wilt, spread

through migrating beetles, is named

 

for how the fungus constricts

each oak’s waterways—all these palm-sized leaves

 

splotched with brown, all these high

trunks tracked with scars.

 

a truncated stump, a diameter almost as long as I am

flush against a verdant lawn—

 

it’s a project of prevention.

where could the wood have gone?

 

what of its neighbors,

who were sending it sugar

 

while it died? what of their suckling

young? and what use

 

to the living are the waterless

dead? i’ve tied up

 

some passageways myself, mostly

to the houses that came with this body, or maybe

 

just the one.

Tara Jayakar is a Brooklyn-based Midwesterner & freelance editor, lover of bread and space. She is the Founder/Bookmaker at Raptor Editing, & she holds an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Tara's work has appeared in The Shoreline Review, the Lumina Journal blog, MACK, andHeadspace #1. 

Special FeaturerbdDevon Wootten, special feature, poetry

Devon Wootten: Worst. Threesome. Ever.

Devon Wootten is a faculty member at Whitman College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, LIT, Aufgabe, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Octopus, the tiny, Backward City Review, 26 – A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, and The California Journal of Poetics. A former resident of Yaddo and Anderson ranch, he is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Montana and ABD in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Iowa. He lives with his wife among the wheat fields of southeast Washington. He curates wikipoesis.com. He's at devonwootten.com.

Special FeaturerbdDevon Wootten, special feature, poetry
Devon Wootten: Worst. Threesome. Ever.
Special FeaturerbdCatherine Esposito Prescott, special feature, poetry

Catherine Esposito Prescott: To Forgive Us Everything

Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of the chapbooks Maria Sings (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press) and The Living Ruin (Finishing Line Press).  Recent poems have appeared in Pleiades, Southern Poetry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry East, MiPOesias, and elsewhere.  A graduate of NYU’s MFA program in Creative Writing-Poetry, Catherine is cofounder and curator of the SWWIM reading series.  She lives in Miami Beach with her husband, two sons, and daughter.

Special FeaturerbdCatherine Esposito Prescott, special feature, poetry
Catherine Esposito Prescott: To Forgive Us Everything
Special FeaturerbdTara Shea Burke, poetry, special feature

Tara Shea Burke: Who Lives and Who Dies

Tara Shea Burke is a queer poet from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She served as poetry editor and co-creator for several small literary journals, and is a guest editor and board member for Sinister Wisdom, a Multicultural Lesbian Literature and Arts Journal. Her chapbook Let the Body Beg was published in 2014, and recent poems can be found in Adrienne, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Minola Review, Public Pool, The Fem, and Whale Road Review. She has taught in Virginia, New Mexico, and Colorado. She lives in Denver. www.tarasheaburke.com

Special FeaturerbdTara Shea Burke, poetry, special feature
Tara Shea Burke: Who Lives and Who Dies
Special FeaturerbdNatalie Solmer, poetry, art, special feature

Visual Poetry by Natalie Solmer

Natalie Solmer grew up in South Bend, Indiana. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Indianapolis Review. After 13 years of working as a grocery store florist, she now teaches composition and writing in various institutions all over Indianapolis. Her work has been published in journals such as Willow Springs, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cimarron Review, MidWest Review and forthcoming from North American Review. More of her work can be found at www.nataliesolmer.com.


Special FeaturerbdNatalie Solmer, poetry, art, special feature
Visual Poetry by Natalie Solmer