We write because we must. Poetry is born of sorrow and joy, love and loss, triumph and disaster. It is inspired by sunset and sunrise, by spring flowers and winter snow, and it comes to us, almost painfully, seeking a way out, a way forward, a way towards and we wrestle with words, with images, with rhyme and intense feelings until suddenly, there it is, on the page, the poem – our poem, eager to be read, anxious to be felt.
Poem of the Month
The Ink Remembered My Pulse
-by O.A.
I sat with the page until the page sat back,
and the white of it grew a spine,
and the blue of the vessel began to track
the salt of a stranger’s line.
The margin didn’t contain my hand;
it swallowed the wrist, the bone, the breath,
until I was nothing of dirt or land,
and nothing of pulse or death—
just a comma paused in a heavy rain,
a stanza bent where the sunlight fell,
the echo of someone forgetting pain
inside of a vowel’s well.
You thought you were reading a quiet sheet,
a ghost of a voice on a woven reed—
look down at the margin, and feel the heat:
I am the ink, and I bleed.