JAY SIZEMORE

poet and author

Father Figures Reviewed in The Lake

My chapbook Father FIgures which has eleven five star reviews on Amazon, just received its first positive review to be published in a literary journal. The review appears as part of the December issue of The Lake, a journal produced from England. It was written by Gram Joel Davies. The magazine is edited by John Murphy. I thank them both, and all the members of their staff, for giving my work the opportunity to be scrutinized in this fashion. I’m eternally grateful to anyone who reads my work, and even more so if they recommend it to others, or share it with them.

I hope you will read the review, and then check out what else they are doing over there at The Lake, as they are doing great things.

Recent Reading at Subterranean Phrases, Louisville

I recently went to Louisville, KY at the behest of good friend Rachel Short, to do a short reading with fellow poet Erin Keane at November’s Subterranean Phrases. This took place on November 12th. I had a grand time, accompanied by my wife, who rarely attends these sort of events, and was a big fan of Erin Keane’s Bruce Springsteen poems. Cowboy Funeral provided the background music, and their style fit the work very well, a cerebral ambience that helps one get in the right mindset for poetry.

You can find some audio from the reading here as part of Rachel’s Keep Louisville Literary radio broadcast. Featured at that link is author/poet Joy Priest, and you will want to hear her work, as she is phenomenal.

Thanks to Rachel Short and Erin Keane and Cowboy Funeral, and the venue Decca for allowing me to participate in the event, as I rarely get these opportunities, and cherish every one.

 

New poem I didn’t submit about Jose Canseco

An Ode to Jose Canseco’s Missing Finger

When your body is a lunar eclipse
appendages may start jumping ship,
wishing to dissipate into molecules
associated with necrotic stench or dust
or maybe having learned the secret
of the afterlife, they can’t bear the fallacy
of wearing skin. Your chips are always
all-in. You’re always leaving bits of yourself
on the table. These are the lessons
self-amputating limbs teach.
Don’t clean the gun when it’s loaded.
Don’t treat life like a sitcom
in which you are the star.
Admit it when you get too old
to hit the homerun.

Two new poems published at Words Dance!!

Two of my new poems went live today over at Words Dance. I am extremely grateful to Amanda Oaks and Jessica Dawson for accepting these pieces. These poems are part of a larger manuscript of response poems I am working on, inspired by Rattle’s Poets Respond series. I’ll continue to keep you updated as more pieces get accepted and published (I hope). I have a chapbook of these poems pretty much ready to go at this point, but hope to write enough of them for a full length.

Three New Poems Published with REVOLUTION JOHN !!!

Today, three new poems went live with Revolution John. They are part of my series of pieces based off inspiration from my social media feed. These were taken from observations on Facebook. As of now, I am no longer actively participating in Facebook for a while to focus on work, but I may do another series of these in which I take inspiration from Twitter. We shall see. Special thanks go to Sheldon Compton for publishing the pieces, and to Nicolette Wong for suggesting this magazine to me.

Did you read these poems? What did you think of them? Let me know in the comments! I’d love to get your feedback.

Poem for Malala Yousafzai

Who is Malala?

Who is this child with the voice of a storm,
sent to face death and turn it into a hurricane,
changing the fist of the desert into an open palm?

Who is this child placing books like shields
in the hands of women, eclipsing the silence
of black gun barrels like mouths stuffed with fire?

She smiles. She makes herself a target.
She shows the oppressed that knowledge
is the atom bomb in a war of water pistols.

She speaks and the warlords shutter their windows,
cower in the halls with their hands over their ears,
these terrorists afraid of shadows and thunder.

Who is this woman so brave, she stands alone
in the path of a Jihad, a holy battle waged
against human rights like an assault on daylight.

Who is this woman, turning herself into a sun?
This woman, her words like comets,
shooting stars for the abandoned to wish upon,

she is the song in the throat of the wingless.
She is the prayer on the lips of the faithless.
She is mother to the orphaned.

Malala is bravery waving hello,
a raised hand faced palm out
to show that even a desert has a lifeline.

 

ghosts of silence

But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse.

Cormac mccarthy, suttree