Welcome to National Poetry Month and Gyroscope Review’s month-long celebration of poets – and their diverse Writing Assistants. Enjoy the audio/video works by previous Gyroscope Review poets and be sure to check out the Author and fun Writing Assistant Bio at the end of each NPM poet post. Don’t forget to tag the poet on Social Media and let them know you enjoyed their work!
Kilonova
Kilonova How am I to deal with this—that somewhere in the universe, two stars the size of cities collide and their union creates something so fearsome inside that all the light falls in, annihilates, cannot tear itself from the inescapable gullet of the thing, except: a ball of blue hues and pale fire profuses, expands aural, as if released from the dead. And this demands of me that I see darkness differently, that it’s the deep that accepts light, that even a black hole cannot contain a halo, and a single star on a coal black night dilutes despair. And yet, somehow every moment of joy feels so precarious, like when I lie with my wife, I calculate (as if I could know) how many such nights remain that I will feel her moss soft body fold into mine, until death’s infinite gravity exacts its cost.
Hate-Pain-Love-Sting
Hate Pain Love Sting I hate blackberries, how their ripening comes in the season when ground-hornets erupt in numbers from their nests, how the sweetest fruit is hidden among the fiercest thorns, that no matter how aggressively I prune, the canes grow lank and menacing, like whips in the hands of some god whose purpose is to remind me that at some point I must pay to get at those berries right at the time they’re prepared to warm my chin with juice that’s honeyed enough to charm those goddam hornets from any lures. I must be willing to bleed, to tear my garments like some bible prophet when their god is blasphemed. And yes, it’s the berry cane that gives me so much more than I can offer, which makes it and me like lovers I guess—the giving, the pain, the fruit and its juices, the tears and the taking, the love and its making, the blossom and the bee.
WRITING ASSISTANT BIO
Ergo (the footrest formerly known as “Amazon’s Choice ErgoFoam Adjustable Foot Rest Under Desk”) was abandoned in a cardboard box on our front porch during the pandemic. After much research, we traced Ergo’s original home (an abusive one, where he was forced to work under the boot of a beer advertising copy writer) was “cogito, ergo sum” — a situation absolutely unsuitable to Ergo’s poetic sensibilities.
Now in its forever home, Ergo has lovingly comforted my feet through multiple drafts of rhyming sonnets, failed attempts at sestinas, and most generously offered me comfort and accepted my feet even as I’ve received over 300 rejection letters in the last two years.
Ergo favorite poem is Pablo Neruda’s “Your Feet” from which it often quotes the last few lines: “But I love your feet / only because they walked / upon the earth and upon /the wind and upon the waters, / until they found me.”
AUTHOR BIO
Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio, his home for over forty years with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is the winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist, a Pushcart, and Best of the Net nominee. His poems have appeared or are upcoming in Whale Road Review, Rattle, Innisfree, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Abandon Journal, and Minyan. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, is published by SheilaNaGig. More at www.dickwestheimer.com
Don’t forget to read the Spring 2024 Issue of Gyroscope Review.
NPM 2024 Poets
April 1 – Cal Freeman
April 2 – Susanna Lang
April 3 – Marion Brown
April 4 – Melissa Huff
April 5 – Elaine Sorrentino
April 6 – Alison Stone
April 7 – Alexandra Fössinger
April 8 – Laurie Kuntz
April 9 – Dick Westheimer