Poet Laureate Poem Prompts

Arianne True (Choctaw, Chickasaw) is a queer poet and teaching artist from Seattle, and has spent most of her work time working with youth. She’s received fellowships and residencies from Jack Straw, the Hugo House, Artist Trust, and the Seattle Repertory Theater, and is a proud alum of Hedgebrook and of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives near the Salish Sea with her cat. Arianne is the 2023-2025 Washington State Poet Laureate.

I – razbliuto

It’s hard to be in love with
someone who can change so much.

My city left me behind chasing
a seat at the table when
our table was already set,
overflowing with possibility
and art and people who can’t afford
to live here anymore. I live an hour
away now and don’t know how to feel when
I see her. Something like longing. Something
like disappointment. Something I worry is
like a word I learned once at her side,
the Russian word that names the feeling
you have for someone you once loved
but no longer do. I worry that’s true.

II – in Russian

There’s no such word in Russian. You can say,
“I once loved you but no longer,” but there’s
no shorthand for it. No sum up. Despite being
in the books of so many experts, so many linguists —
no such feeling in its source language. Best guess:
a typo in a 60s tv show. Replicated somehow to now.
A not-Russian word that only exists in English.

III – object permanence

I feel home, though, in some of the same places.
Pioneer Square and the Seattle Center, bookends
of a past continually overwritten and a future imagined once,
two half-truths preserved in architecture.  These buildings at least
feel real to me, like they’ll still be there when I turn around.
It’s hard to feel steady when you’re surrounded by disappearances,
a constantly changing view. How much was ever really there?
I trust the old bricks and concrete most in this city.
[Still not more than the trees that grow up the ravines.]

IV – no what

it’s hard to tell        someone you left
everything they would’ve needed to change
for you to keep wanting them.
you shouldn’t try. living things change,
it is just hard to love living things
(harder not to) the city is a living thing,
you know. like I am a living thing to
the microscopic creatures that populate
my body who make it somewhere
I can live too. no me without them.
no city without who? hard to say
for a city bleeding out. what are you losing?
when will you notice? and what
will you do then?

V – somehow it’s not happening here but

Sometimes I have to speak so plainly that my voice gets lost in the words.
It’s to be understood when you’re swimming against misconceptions.
It still only works when someone will listen. Is willing to hear.

VI – why here

My writing exists because this is home. Me born to another city
is another artist, who knows her medium? Something about this
place keeps breathing me words. Maybe it’s the dense undergrowth,
so many places for a whisper to catch and hide, to wait for you.
So easy to move slow here, easy to spend an hour on the bus
or twenty minutes walking. Cars dull my senses, speed me up
to where I can’t catch the details anymore. I write more when
I am slow in the world, and this home made that so easy
for so long. It’s harder to get here now, but when I can
the whispers are still waiting, falling with the pine needles
or pushing up with irises, caught in the air of a bumblebee’s
fuzz as they sleep in a rosebud. Other places have flowers,
but these ones know my name.

VII – whole-body ear

I wear thinner shoes now
and can feel the streetcar
fifty feet away, every move
and stop spreads sensation
across the soles of my feet.
This place always teaching
me new ways to listen.

VIII – what about the other colors

Thick pigeons flock and split
like a grey kaleidoscope no one is turning
in the one hour we have of snow.
So many land together three stories up,
a whole crenellation of plump birds.
The rest must’ve gone west somewhere,
maybe past the clock tower,
I can’t see them now.

IX – cadence

I think what I want is for hometown to mean something.
Something tangible, more than longing or nostalgia,
to mean something with a body. Some kind of right
to live in your home. Some new knowing (not new
to me) that these streets were parents for some of us.
Some of us were raised by buildings and bus routes
and empty auditorium stages, by old old trees,
by blackberries and sticky rhododendron blooms and
the salmon that come home every year to become
the stream again. Some of us were raised by
pavement and school fields and drainage ditches.
By strangers and being a stranger show after show.
By the water that runs over all of them. (us.) None
of these are just images. This is not a poem, it’s
a map. This is not a poem, it’s a lineage. I am
telling you my family. I am telling you my home.
I am telling you one of the saddest things I know,
that none of that is allowed to matter more than
money in the city that’s been built here. Maybe
what I miss is like parents before you find out they
are only human too. I am not surprised by the
changes here anymore. But I am surprised
by the things no one notices. I live in shock that
we have no right to our home.

This poem was commisioned and published by Front Porch–Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. Reprinted with permission from the author.

Anis Mojgani is the current Poet Laureate of Oregon. A two-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, he has been awarded residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Caldera, AIR Serenbe, The Bloedel Nature Reserve, The Sou’wester, and the Oregon Literary Arts Writers-In-The-Schools program. A recipient of an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellowship, Anis has done commissions for the Getty Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum; and his work has appeared on HBO, National Public Radio, and as part of the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series. His work has appeared in the pages of the NYTimes, Rattle, Platypus, Winter Tangerine, Forklift Ohio, and Bat City Review.

Known for his performances and well regarded for them the world over, Anis has performed at hundreds of universities across the U.S.; festivals around the globe such as the Sydney Writers Festival, Jamaica’s Calabash festival, and Seoul’s Young Writers Festival; and for audiences as varied as the United Nations and the House of Blues. The author of five books of poetry and the libretto for Sanctuaries, his first children’s book is forthcoming from Holiday House/Neal Porter Books. Originally from New Orleans, Anis currently lives in Portland Oregon.

Bio from the Piano Farm

This is for the fat girls. This is for the little brothers. This is for the schoolyard wimps. This is for the childhood bullies who tormented them. This is for the former prom queen. This is for the milk crate ball players. This is for the nighttime cereal eaters. This is for the retired elderly Wal-Mart storefront door greeters.

Shake the dust.

This is for the benches and the people sitting on them. This is for the bus drivers, driving a million broken hymns. This is for the men who have to hold down three jobs, simply to hold their children. This is for the night schoolers, and the midnight bike riders who are trying to fly.

Shake the dust.

For the two-year-olds who cannot be understood because they speak half English and half God. Shake the dust. For the girls with the brothers that are crazy, shake the dust.

For the boys with the beautiful sisters, the gym class wallflowers, the twelveyear-olds afraid of taking public showers, the kid who’s late to class ’cause he forgot the combination to his lockers, for the girl who loves somebody else, shake the dust.

This is for the hard men, who want to love, but know it won’t come. For the ones who are told to speak only when spoken to, and then are never spoken to, the ones who the amendments do not stand up for, the ones who are forgotten:

Speak every time you stand, so you do not forget yourselves. Do not let a second go by that does not remind you that your heart beats nine hundred times a day, and there are enough gallons of blood to make you an ocean.

This is for the police officers. This is for the meter maid. This is for the celibate pedophile who keeps on struggling. This is for the poetry teachers. This is for the people who go on vacations alone, and for the crappy artists and the actors that suck, shake the dust.

This is for the sweat that drips off of Mick Jagger’s lips, for the shaking skirt on Tina Turner’s shaking hips, for the heavens and the hells through which Tina has lived. This is for the tired and the dreamers, the family that’ll never be like the Cleavers with the perfectly-made dinners and the sons like Wally and the Beaver. For the bigots, the sexists, and the killers, the big-house pint sentence cat becoming redeemers, and for the springtime, that always comes after the winters.

This is for you.

Make sure that, by the time the fisherman returns, you are gone. Make these blue streams worth it, because, just like the days I’m burning at both ends, and every time I write, every time I bike through the night, every time I open my eyes, I am cutting out a part of myself to give to you. So shake the dust, and take me with you when you do, for none of this has ever been for me.

All that was placed inside, that continues pushing like waves, pushes for you. So take the world by its clothespins and shake it out again and again, jump on top and take it for a spin, and when you hop off shake it out again, for this is yours.

Make my words worth it. Make this not just another poem that I write. Not just another poem like just another night that sits heavy above us all – walk into it. Breathe it in. Let it crash through the halls of your arms, like the millions of years and millions of poets that course like blood, pumping and pushing, making you live, making you live, shaking the dust, so when the world knocks at your door, turn the knob and open on up, and run into its big, big hands with open arms.

Reprinted with permission from the author, from his collection Songs from the River (Write Bloody Publishing 2013).

Stacy Boe Miller, the current poet laureate of Moscow, Idaho, is a poet, essayist, and editor originally from a small town in the northeast corner of Wyoming. She holds a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, a BA in Secondary Education from the University of Idaho, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. Her poetry and creative non-fiction essays can be found in Terrain (Terrain.org), Copper Nickel, Mid-American Review, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. Several times a year she teaches poetry workshops to students from 4th-8th grade. She serves on the board of High Desert Journal.

sucking into themselves like I shied
inward when asked, How
is your father? like my father’s shoulders

collapsed toward his ribs.
I rubbed them softly
while mom magneted
Do Not Resuscitate

to the fridge. I learned
to sleep everywhere—plastic
chairs, a bench at the end
of his hospital bed,
even with the fourth of July
outside, helicopters daily
landing on the roof. I pulled

food into myself with a new
desperation—dark pudding with skin
on top, papery rice noodles,
fresh cherries until
I was sick. In the last days,

his mind went back
to work. He worried about the concrete
truck waiting, asked my mom to feed
his crew, fell asleep exhausted from
cleaning out the shop. I watched

his hands move in his sleep, his lips
fretting measurements. It’s OK, my mother said,
just let your father work.

 

This poem was first published in the Bellingham Review, June 2022, and is reprinted with permission of the author.