Category Archives: Poetry

POEM WEDNESDAY – Bunny-Hole by Coco Owen

17 Wednesday Feb 2016

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This poem first appeared n the Winter 2010 issue of The Antioch Review.

 

BUNNYHOLE
by Coco Owen


                        She's bedded         down in the hollow 
                     of her mother's        expectation.
                               She's dug          for her furring
                                   curves            a gaze-escape
                               that's her              retreat from
                        the family den          of sex inequity.

                        There, under-               ground, her Flopsy
                    self's centered in         her better nature's
                      itchy need for                separation from her warren kin.
                     Her little hole's                 a burrower's
                         Wonderland                   furnished with
                        a little desk                 & chair of knotty pine.

                            Holed-up,                 hermitlike—
                    this booby hutch             her escape hatch—
                      her invaginate                imagination takes
                  a pubis-eyed view            from her earthen
                   nest of premature             selfconsciousness.
                     Her precocious               interiority's

                    like a tulip bulb,               dirt-bulwarked;
                       a Netherlands               in hiding
                      from predation               of the hawked
                              model of                femininity to which
                      she's promised               her tawny beauty marking
                    her as a fancier's           or furrier's moving target.

                         She hankers in            her bunker, nests.
       She doffs her rabbit coat,            & scribbles code
    in her moleskin notebook               as self-preservation gesture.
                      She's turncoat                   to the topside's
           topsy-turvy etiquette                 expected of game girls.
            Haunted, she broods                her hunted selves.

***

cocoowenCoco Owen lives in Los Angeles and has published poems in 1913: A Journal of Forms, CutBank, The Journal, Rio Grande Review, and The Feminist Wire, among many other venues. She has chapbooks forthcoming in 2016 from Tammy and dancing girl press. She was a finalist in several recent book contests, including for the May Swenson Poetry Award. Owen serves on the board of Les Figues Press and you can read more of her work at http://www.cocoowenphd.com.

 

 

© The Antioch Review 2016

POEM WEDNESDAY – Victors by John Witte

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

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This poem is from the Spring 2015 issue of The Antioch Review.

 

VICTORS
by John Witte

No one remembers with certainty when we began to hate
our voices cold quavering while the voices of others

though we could not understand their language sounded
supple and melodious our own tongues lifted and fell

like hammers she hated her strangled voice he clanged
and pealed a voice not his own as the Romans must have

heard in the palaver of the Greeks a voluptuous music
and fallen silent pierced by their own brazen voices

***

Witte5AJohn Witte’s poems have appeared widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and been included in The Norton Introduction to Literature, among several anthologies. He is the author of LOVING THE DAYS (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), THE HURTLING (Orchises Press, 2005), SECOND NATURE (University of Washington Press, 2008),and DISQUIET (University of Washington Press, 2015). He was for thirty years the editor of Northwest Review, as well as of numerous books, including THE COLLECTED POEMS OF HAZEL HALL (Oregon State University Press, 2000). The recipient of two writing fellowships from the NEA, a residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and numerous other grants and awards, he lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches literature at the University of Oregon. More may be found on his website: http://www.johnwittepoet.com

 

 

© 2016 The Antioch Review

POEM WEDNESDAY – BY ACCIDENT by Amit Majmudar

23 Wednesday Dec 2015

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3480196_origOn December 17, 2015, Ohio Governor, John R. Kasich named Dr. Amit Majmudar of Dublin, Ohio as Ohio’s first poet laureate. By establishing the position of Poet Laureate in 2014, Ohio joins the ranks of the majority of states that have a similar role. All of us at the Antioch Review wish him the very best as he works to promote poetry in Ohio. When asked about his new position, Majmudar said,

I see the Laureateship as a great honor, but only partly as a validation of my own poetry. I believe my selection for it, above all, to be a validation of my twofold approach to poetry in Ohio. I envision a Laureateship that will reintegrate poetry into the already thriving Ohio performing arts scene by organizing performances that hybridize poetry, music, and dance. Simultaneously, I intend to secure poetry’s future in Ohio through the Ohio Future Laureates Program, in which ten established Ohio poets will each mentor standout student poets nominated by Ohio’s ten most underprivileged school districts. More projects will develop over the next two years, establishing, I hope, a dynamic precedent for my successors in this post.

Following is a poem by Amit Majmudar that was published in the Antioch Review, Fall 2011 issue.

BY ACCIDENT
by Amit Majmudar

First she gave me the wound by accident.
Then the tourniquet she tied unwound by accident.

Your friend may want to start running.
I gave his scent to the hounds by accident.

Balloons on the mailbox, ambulance in the driveway.
Bobbing for apples I drowned by accident.

Did someone tell the devil we were building Eden?
Or did he slither on the grounds by accident?

I said some crazy things, but I swear, officer,
I burned her place down by accident.

Only surfaces interest me.
What depths I sound I sound by accident.

“What should we look for in a ghazal, Amit?”
Inevitabilities found by accident.

***

Amit Majmudar is a novelist, poet, essayist, and diagnostic nuclear radiologist (M.D.). He writes and practices in Dublin, Ohio, where he lives with his wife, twin sons, and baby daughter.

© 2015 The Antioch Review