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Poetry Breakfast

Serving a little poetic nourishment every morning. Start your day with our new expanded menu. Poems, of course, are our specialty. But we will also be serving a fuller menu that includes poetry book reviews to feed poets' and poetry lovers' souls.

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Daily Poetry

Before Dawn – A Poem by Joan Higuchi

Before Dawn

Before a gleam appears
on the ledge of the horizon-
Before the sky blushes
in acknowledgment
of the compliments
of early risers-
Before a glint of sunlight
torches the dew on grass
creating sparklers

I kiss the dark, stand
Queen of the Night
naming shadows-
snatch pleasure from
the absence of noise
the cacophony of people
and the impedimenta
of their lives

soak myself in peace
filled with the quiet sounds
of the working world
a dancer poised on one toe
as though time and motion
are unrelated

until a robin in nearby nest
announcing perception
of the shift of light
burbles in his exotic language
clear in its translation.

 

Published in Joan Higuchi’s chapbook  A World of Small Things Singing  (www.finishinglinepress.com)

 

About the Poet:  Joan Higuchi is a multiple prize winner in Writer’s Digest contests, including a category first place as well as the Miracles competition sponsored by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association. Her poems have appeared in many online and print productions and she is the author of one chapbook of nature poems A World of Small Things Singing (www.finishinglinepress) and a collection based on her work as an RN in the field of mental health (www.localgemsopetrypress.com/).

 

 

Poetry Breakfast accepts submissions of poetry and poetry related creative non-fiction year-round.  See our Submission Guidelines page for details on submitting your work.

Start your morning with a nourishing poem.  Follow us on  Twitter, Facebook, and  Tumblr,  and enjoy a new poem every morning straight to your feed.

Baklava – A Poem by Sarah Law

Baklava

Three soft parcels
two forks, one plate

thin pastry. Each centre
buckles under pressure

-tines, tongue, molars –
unbearably sweet.

What should I say of
daylight hours?

Superficial narratives,
shopping, coffee, lists.

Inside, the body, wrapped
in its skin; the hot heart.

Words under pressure
yield a shock of honey;

the ceiling removed,
the star-bright sky.

 

 

About the Poet:  Sarah Law lives in London and teaches for the Open University and elsewhere. She has published five poetry collections, the latest of which is Ink’s Wish(Gatehouse, 2014). Other recent poems have appeared in Antiphon, Eunoia Review, Snapdragon, Stride, Blue Pepper and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Follow her on twitter @drsarahlaw

 

Poetry Breakfast accepts submissions of poetry and poetry related creative non-fiction year-round.  See our Submission Guidelines page for details on submitting your work.

Start your morning with a nourishing poem.  Follow us on  Twitter, Facebook, and  Tumblr,  and enjoy a new poem every morning straight to your feed.

I Know – A Poem by James Diaz

I Know

I know how much faith can be lost
that you can die
without any ink ever spilled
in your name
i know some things you just cannot come back from
i know that the brink has many ledges
to stand and fall off of
head first, like your birth into this world
i know forgiveness
is the face in the mirror
that looks away
i know where you’re calling from
that payphone by the highway that they took out years ago
i know if you’ve never made bail
you don’t really know what uncertainty is like
i know saying i’m powerless in a room full of strangers doesn’t make it so
how no alley way is only shadows but what those shadows represent
that the stuffing can be pulled out of you so young
you are this things they have no name for
missing buttons, chewed off paw
and a smile that masks a lot of darkness
i know.

 

About the Poet:  James Diaz is the founding editor of the literary arts & music journal Anti-Heroin Chic http://heroinchic.weebly.com/. His poems can be found in Quail Bell Magazine, HIV Here & Now, Foliate Oak and Ditch. His debut book of poems, This Someone I Call Stranger, is forthcoming from Indolent Books (2018).

 

Poetry Breakfast accepts submissions of poetry and poetry related creative non-fiction year-round.  See our Submission Guidelines page for details on submitting your work.

Start your morning with a nourishing poem.  Follow us on  Twitter, Facebook, and  Tumblr,  and enjoy a new poem every morning straight to your feed.

Maple Sap and Rosewater – A Poem by Adrian Slonaker

Maple Sap and Rosewater

King crimson maple tree branches
dangling behind my back
behind your back,
sap speckling the park bench, rivaling this afternoon’s raindrops.
How long has the King reigned here?
Thirty years? Fifty years?

Will you beautify my life for as long as this tree has beautified this spot?
It’s pointless to conjecture.
Why dwell on the unknowable
when the knowable is all too real
and all too sublime:
that elusive sating of mind hunger
and skin hunger.

Poets propose that you touch my soul.
Scientists say you switch on my brain’s pleasure center.
Poetry or science,
press your thigh closer to mine
as leather meets velvet.

 

 

About the Poet:  Adrian Slonaker works as a copywriter and copy editor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA. Adrian’s poetry has appeared in Amaryllis, Ginosko Literary Journal, The Mackinac, Eunoia Review, Oddball Magazine, and others.  

 

Poetry Breakfast accepts submissions of poetry and poetry related creative non-fiction year-round.  See our Submission Guidelines page for details on submitting your work.

Start your morning with a nourishing poem.  Follow us on  Twitter, Facebook, and  Tumblr,  and enjoy a new poem every morning straight to your feed.

Lemon Cake – A Poem by Sarah Law

Lemon Cake

My mother pushes the plate away,
setting her silver fork down;

Harriett’s Special Blend has quenched
her thirst (my skin gets a heated sheen);

near us a young girl swings her legs,
her mother’s hennaed hair hangs down.

Four p.m. I am fifty next Wednesday,
not knowing how so many years

are consumed in sips & forkfuls.
Another chunk of sugared sharpness —

perhaps I should take a photograph,
capture what’s left of life’s moment;

but the neighbouring couple’s changed
into an elderly man and his wife;

he eases himself into place & asks
if I’ve been to Bettys of Harrogate,

I tell him no but I’ve been to Rome,
and by the Spanish Steps a tearoom

very like Bettys where maids in aprons
serve fine tea in a blue-cream setting,

how romantic he says, & I think of
John Keats, dying in youth and sadness,

of names unwritten in tea or water,
hear my mother repeating herself

to the elderly wife, & I lift the refilled
cup (a tearoom is a sort of hallows

where the slips in time are steeped)
& commit to finishing it.

 

 

About the Poet:  Sarah Law lives in London and teaches for the Open University and elsewhere. She has published five poetry collections, the latest of which is Ink’s Wish (Gatehouse, 2014). Other recent poems have appeared in Antiphon, Eunoia Review, Snapdragon, Stride, Blue Pepper and Ink, Sweat & Tears. Follow her on twitter @drsarahlaw

 

Poetry Breakfast accepts submissions of poetry and poetry related creative non-fiction year-round.  See our Submission Guidelines page for details on submitting your work.

Start your morning with a nourishing poem.  Follow us on  Twitter, Facebook, and  Tumblr,  and enjoy a new poem every morning straight to your feed.

An Algorithm for Happiness – A Poem by Maurice Devitt

An Algorithm for Happiness

He recognised the driver as someone
he had never seen before
and, as each moment is an answer
to the last, realised the similarity
to his mother, who had run
away before he was born
and, for years, had captured the joy
of her guilt in rushed postcards
written from the last outpost
of a normal life. He knew
that in a place like this, he couldn’t
throw a stone without missing her,
but remembered that ardour
is the last coat of a loveless man
who, when staring into the future,
can only see the past.

 

 

About the Poet: Maurice Devitt – Runner-up in The Interpreter’s House Poetry Competition in 2017, he was winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition in 2015 and has been placed or shortlisted in many competitions including the Patrick Kavanagh Award, Listowel Collection Competition, Over the Edge New Writer Competition, Cuirt New Writing Award and the Cork Literary Review. He has had poems published in Ireland, England, Scotland, the US, Mexico, Romania, India and Australia and has a debut collection upcoming in 2018 with Doire Press.

 

Poetry Breakfast accepts submissions of poetry and poetry related creative non-fiction year-round.  See our Submission Guidelines page for details on submitting your work.

Start your morning with a nourishing poem.  Follow us on  Twitter, Facebook, and  Tumblr,  and enjoy a new poem every morning straight to your feed.

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