Shared Psychosis: An Interview with Sara Tantlinger

One of the things I enjoy about National Poetry Writing Month (aka "NaPoWriMo") is Gerald So's "30 Days of the 5-2" Crime Poetry blog tour. He asks poets and readers to contribute something for a calendar day related to his journal of crime poetry. I've participated in the past (and I also published a new piece at the 5-2 just last month for "Pi Day") but this time around I decided to do something different: conduct an interview. As luck would have it, I knew one of the recent contributors to the journal, because she's working with me as a…

Iambic Pentagrameter – a sicilian quintain

Iambic Pentagrameter we gather up the sacrificial goats twisting heads to face the sky above we snick our razors quick across their throats wringing necks to squeeze out all the blood naked in the mud and incense smoke Update 5.3.15: Jen Barnes of Raw Dog Screaming Press has posted a video of my reading of this visual poem at the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing over on facebook.

the severed hand speaks

when it first crawled the stump stung but it realized somewhere within the ring of bottomless pain at its base that it was feeling and because it was feeling it was thinking if only in that strange way that we all quiver in powerlessness when overcome with agony like a child banished to the corner by a teacher we secretly want to kill and then it realized that it once had a teacher, too -- an instructor of American Sign Language who used to rap its knuckles when it misproduced (which was the teacher's way of saying mispronounced) simple expressions…