A Letter to the Future Without Snow
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
the snow of an urban bread, bodied and laced by vehicular coughing and streetcar bells in the atmosphere. Streets thickening with boots kneading at winter’s blanket. Stop at the light.
Do you have a coldness that is not black, where you are? Does gravity treat your depression differently than it does for us here? Getting us down, get down, down and out, lie down, fall down, high speed down Blue Valley. That’s a thrill.
Do you sky in your dreams? Me I dream of flying. Awake, I am a pedestrian on the urban map. Nothing like the stars you reach. I imagine you are an ancient ship, in the wrong century. I guess you can’t spin your wheel the way kids do here, roaring through the snow castles, crashing into towers.
Intersectionality. Do you have lights that tell you when to stop when to go when to slow? Do you see ideological collisions as genetic? Monsanto, I mean. Do you try and whitewash it all, or colour blind yourself?
oh the storm: an immense traffic jam, slowing you down to a sargasso sea—
Imagine a hill of wintered wooliness, thick and clustering, while you sleep beneath your thin thermal layers, shedding of dog dreams—
Do you have dogs where you are? Do the dogs remember their relatives left behind, Huskies or the Samoyeds? Do you feel their longing to go home? Do you even dream?
Me, I dream of a future puddle holding a place in the sun, one foot and a leg disappearing the dark sky from your eyes—
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My Black Sun
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
a soggy dishrag that didn’t have the privilege of
optimist chromosomes, blue sky mitochondria
I was conceived with black sun
saturnine blood and
un-wanted on the Jupiter voyage
Don’t invite me then
Wails the
black hole at my heart
I am a monster
born this way
maybe—I don’t
blame my parents
but the movie stars, bevvy of Beverly Hills
bikini, sunlight as the first cause
of the way-too-creepy
cancer circling the skimpy pool parties
Oh, Peter Sellers lend me your white pool party shoes
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About the Author
Concetta (cetta) Principe is a writer of poetry, creative non-fiction, and scholarship on trauma and literature. She has five poetry collections to her credit. Her poetry collection, This Real, published by Pedlar Press, was long-listed for the Raymond Souster Award in 2017. Her most recent project is a collection of essays, Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide, published with Gordon Hill Press (2021). Discipline n. v.: A Lyric Memoir will be coming out with Palimpsest Press in 2023. Her work has appeared previously in Wordgathering, as well as in Matrix, Eastern Iowa Review, The Malahat Review, among others.