Katie Daley has, in her time, scrubbed the toilets of poets and mowed the fairways of gangsters. Her work has appeared in various journals and on stages across North America, and she is a seasoned semi-finalist of four National Poetry Slams. In collaboration with her husband, she writes and performs in the band Drifters Inn, a weaving of guitars, banjos, spoken word, and song.
Reasons to Be Cheerful in an Age of Really Bad News There are breachmenders in the world they advertise their expertise on the sides of trucks There are tea kettles that moan like trains Entire evenings that smell like rain The county prison library is full of adult romance novels with the last three pages torn out Your heart is still versatile enough to beat in that holy emptiness between your legs Between earthworms & stars us & us Everything passes Every blister runs out of fester & steam All eras weep & fade You've seen worse days & better You've heard Maria Callas & Deep Purple shatter the same courtyard under the same blue dome of morning While at the other end of town carpenters sang between hammer beats about how pretty they are You've lived in a fungus lab, under a piano, by a river Tablefuls of old French farmers once stood, raised their glasses in your direction & wished you good courage as you struggled through the square under the weight of your hunger and your burdens You've bought warm loaves of bread from strangers & carried each one home in the crook of your arm Cretan widows have left peanut butter jars full of wildflowers on your doorstep And finally, & always, you must remember that in a laundromat somewhere not far from here it’s entirely possible that a naked accordionist is still playing a polka while the other patrons strip down to their underwear & dance |
David Hassler directs the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2009, he cofounded Traveling Stanzas, a community arts project which creates illustrations in response to poems generated from community workshops in schools, healthcare facilities, libraries, senior centers, and veterans’ organizations. Hassler is the author or editor of nine books of poetry and nonfiction, including Red Kimono, Yellow Barn; Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community; and Speak a Powerful Magic: Ten Years of the Traveling Stanzas Poetry Project.
Interbeing Beneath a thin layer of soil, along vast fungal networks, trees talk to one another, warning of insect attacks. They have evolved as allies. We, too, are relational beings, what trees breathe out, we breathe in. The earth is a vast lung of which we are a part. When George Floyd gasped, “I can’t breathe,” his dying words became a rallying cry, another distress signal to wake up and activate a seedbed in our bodies to dismantle systemic racism and white supremacy. Can white America learn from the trees to work as allies and honor the breath of Georgy Floyd? |
Launched by poets Mark Flanigan and Jim Palmarini in 2014, Word of Mouth was inspired by the late Cincinnati poet Aralee Strange. Poets of all stripes are welcome to show up, listen, and mouth off.