This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features teen poet Moth Allen reading his poem "Your Hands."

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features highschooler Bella Phinney reading her poem called "My Friend."

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

The poem "Wildlife" by Ellen Bass is available to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize and a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. She co-edited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, also a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, she has received grants and scholarships from Hedgebrook, the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, and Summer Literary Seminars. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her poems and criticism have appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Diode, RHINO, The Guardian, LARB, The Georgia Review, and DIAGRAM. She is a high school teacher in Denver where she lives with her family. Learn more at emilyperez.org.

Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear  frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Learn more at ellenbass.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

The poem, "What Do Women Want?" by Kim Addonizio is available to read on the Poetry Foundation website. 

Susana H. Case, Ph. D., is the author of nine books of poetry. If This Isn’t Love, from Broadstone Books (2023) is her newest. The Damage Done, from Broadstone Books, won a Pinnacle Award for Best Poetry Book. Dead Shark on the N Train, from Broadstone Books (2020), also won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book, as well as a NYC Big Book Awards Distinguished Favorite, and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Drugstore Blue, from Five Oaks Press, won an Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY). She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. The Scottish Café was reprinted as an English-Polish edition by the University of Opole Press and as an English-Ukrainian edition by Slapering Hol Press. Case’s poems appear in Calyx, The Cortland Review, Fourteen Hills, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, and RHINO, among others. Aside from Polish and Ukrainian, she has been published via translation into Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Case is co-editor, with Margo Taft Stever, of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk and Cake Press (2022) which was a finalist for an American Book Fest award and a International Book Award in the anthology category and was Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. She is co-editor with Margo Taft Stever and Sandra Yannone of Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic, Salmon Poetry, 2026.

Susana co-curates, with Lynn McGee (series founder), Sandy Yannone, and Carolyne Wright, the W-E (West-East) Bicoastal Poets of the Pandemic and Beyond series which features writers from both coasts and many other regions.

She recently retired as Professor from the New York Institute of Technology in New York City, where she taught for thirty-eight years. Learn more at: susanahcase.com

Kim Addonizio is the author of nine poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/music CDS: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, the companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a collaboration with woodcut artist Charles D. Jones.   Her poetry has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Hungarian. Collections have been published in China, Spain, Mexico, Lebanon, and the UK. Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her latest collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton). Learn more at: www.kimaddonizio.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Holly Iglesias reading "The Hispanic Invasion of Texas," by María Esquinca, from the collection Where Heaven Sinks. 

María Esqunica's poem, "This Hispanic Invasion of Texas," can be found on the Michigan Quarterly Review website.

Holly Iglesias has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Edward Albee Foundation. Her poetry collections are Souvenirs of Shrunken World, Angles of Approach, and Sleeping Things. She is working on an intergenerational memoir in prose fragments that is tentatively entitled Theories of Flight.

María Esquinca is a Xicana educator, poet and journalist. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico and grew up in El Paso, Texas. She currently teaches newcomers who are recent immigrants at San Francisco International High School. Her debut collection, Where Heaven Sinks was the 2024 Andres Montoya Poetry Prize winner, and was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera. Learn more at: mariaesquinca.org

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Elizabeth Sylvia's second collection, Scythe (2026), is out now from River River Books. Her first book, None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. Her chapbook My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties (2025), available from Ballerini Books, was a runner-up for the Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize. Elizabeth has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by the Burnside Review, C&R Press, DIAGRAM, Thirty West, Rare Swan and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. She has received fellowships from the New York Public Library, the West Chester University Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Elizabeth has led workshops at MassPoetry, Lit Youngstown, and Tell it Slant. She is the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize.

Elizabeth grew up on Martha’s Vineyard and currently teaches in Southeastern Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and extravagantly demanding garden. Learn more at: elizabethsylviapoet.net

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

You can read "Persimmons" by Li-Young Lee on the Poetry Foundation's website.

Kathryn Petruccelli is a Pushcart-, Best of the Net-, and Best Small Fictions-nominated poet with roots in spoken word and a degree in teaching English language learners. She is also the host of Melody or Witchcraft, a podcast where a poet reads a work of their own and an Emily Dickinson poem of their choosing that contributed to their work. The podcast is based on the idea that poetry can be a launchpoint to discuss the pressing issues of today. 

Kathryn's poetry has appeared in places like the Massachusetts Review, Whale Road Review, RHINO, About Place Journal, and Anacapa Review. You can find her prose at places like SweetLit, Switch, Fictive Dream, The Los Angeles Review, and Wrong Turn Lit. Kathryn recently relocated with her family to the west of Ireland which she enjoys greatly besides missing her former job as tour guide at the Emily Dickinson Museum. She teaches online, pay-what-you-can workshops that aim to build community. Come say hello via her website: poetroar.com, or at her Substack newsletter, Ask the Poet.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Owen Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry, Marriage Map, Sometimes Full of Daylight, Field Light, and most recently Prayer of Six Wings, along with three chapbooks. best man was the recipient of the 2016 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize of the New England Poetry Club. Field Light was a “Must Read” selection of the Massachusetts Books Awards. Major prizes include: The E.E. Cummings Prize (2024), The Rumi Prize for Poetry/Arts & Letters (2023), The Guernsey International Poetry Prize (2023), and The International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (2016). Other prizes include: Second Prize 2018 Wigtown (Scotland) International Poetry Competition and Finalist, 2017 Pablo Neruda Award. His poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Poetry Wales, The Mississippi Review, Southward, The Four Way Review, Cider Press Review, and Arts and Letters. He is a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and lectures extensively on topics of Narrative Medicine.

Learn more at: www.owenlewispoet.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Ken Haas. Ken reads seven of his poems: "Stone Fruit," "Speak English," "Reading at the Country Fair," "The Grill," "When Pickleball Saved the World," "The Wreck in Numbers" and "Comfort for the Ages."

Ken Haas grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City but has lived for 50 years now in San Francisco, where he works in healthcare. He received an AB in History and Literature at Harvard College, and received an MA in English literature at the University of Sussex, U.K., where he wrote his thesis on Wallace Stevens. A life-long poetry writer, Ken has spent the majority of his career as a hi-tech executive and biotech venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. His first poetry book, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, as well as a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women. Ken has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award, and serves on the Board of the Community of Writers. His poems have appeared in over 50 journals and numerous anthologies.

Check out the Penn Sound poetry archive mentioned in this episode at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/.

Learn more about Ken at www.kenhaas.org.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is the author of two books of poetry: Boomhouse  (2023, The 3rd Thing Press), which won the 2024 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and What Came Down in the Smoke (forthcoming in 2026 from JackLeg Press). Her creative work has been supported by Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, MacDowell, NYSCA/NYFA, and Vermont Studio Center.

Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current Press),  Allium, Ballast, Bedfellows, Grist, Heavy Feather Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Northern New England Review, Tyger Quarterly, Waxwing, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media artworks have been featured in exhibitions across the United States. They are included in the permanent collections of The University of Hartford and The University of Southern Maine. 

Summer is an enrolled member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.

Learn more at www.summerjhart.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Kimberly Ann Priest. She reads “Gomorrah,” “The Chickens," “Cake” and “First Visit to the Sister Survivors Exhibit” of her own work, as well as "Eat this Bread" by Pádraig Ó Tuama and "Kisser" by Pascale Petit.

Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer and photographer whose book Wolves in Shells won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of tether & lung(Texas Review Press 2025) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications 2021), finalist for the American Best Book Awards. Her chapbooks include The Optimist Shelters in Place (Harbor Editions 2022), Parrot Flower (Glass Poetry Press 2021), still life (PANK 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (FLP 2017). Kimberly's writing and scholarly interests are deeply focused on gender-based trauma, domestic ecologies, eco-poetics, eco-spirituality, ecofeminism, women's studies, neurodivergence studies, classic film studies, narrative justice, arts-based research, and writing for therapeutic purposes. 

Hailing from the working-class world of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Kimberly earned her BA (Regent University) and MA (Central Michigan University) degrees in English Language & Literature and her MFA (New England College) in Poetry/Nonfiction mid-life while raising two children to young adulthood. She is the great-granddaughter of Scottish immigrants and miners on her father's side, and the granddaughter of a traveling preacher on her mother's side. Her family history is a well-spring of Biblical lore and MacGregor clan legends, equally fraught with displacement, religious abuses, and troubled attachments. Growing up on the banks of Lake Superior, she spent her youth hiding among the rocks along the lakeshore to read scores of books during the warmer seasons while working as a carhop at a local 1950s-style drive-in restaurant. 

A survivor of gendered violence and an active outdoorswoman, she has participated in initiatives to increase awareness concerning sexual assault, survivorship, and healing through nature and artistic expression. Her literary interests include women poets and storytellers, stories that explore religious imaginations and spirituality, feminist narratives of trauma, migration, endangered species, and rewilding, and travel and nature writing. She has received fellowships and residencies from Monson Arts, SAFTA, Ghost Ranch, and Proximity Writer's House, and she has served as an editorial intern for Sundress Publications and Black Earth Institute as well as an associate editor for six years with the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry. 

Winner of the 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize and a Brooklyn Girls Books prize, her work has appeared in literary journals such as Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, Salamander, RHINO, Chicago Quarterly Review,, and The Birmingham Poetry Review. Her work has also been selected for Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and appears in the second edition of the textbook Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology from Bloomsbury Academic.

Currently, Kimberly is an assistant professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, and a guest teaching artist at The Telling Room in Portland, Maine. She is a member of the Association of Writers and Publishers, Poets & Writers, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and the National Association for Poetry Therapy. She met her husband during the five years she worked at a summer camp and lived part-time in Maine hiking the state's breathtaking landscape. They eloped to Scotland and live together in Maine. Learn more about Kimberly Ann at www.kimberlyannpriest.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Jeri Theriault is a Franco-American poet who grew up in Waterville, Maine, and graduated from Colby College, later earning degrees from USM (MS in Instructional Leadership) and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA in Poetry). Her teaching career spanned thirty-four years, including seven years in Prague, six of them as English Department chair at the International School of Prague. She lives now in South Portland with my husband, the composer, Philip Carlsen. 

Learn more at www.jeritheriault.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions) Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions), and Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community. In 2024, he and visual artist Susan Webster published A Quiet Book, collaborations in writing and visual art (Brynmorgen Press).

He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, The Sun, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The New York Times Magazine. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical and was the host/creator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future.

Stuart was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine for over twenty-five years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts.

Learn more at stuartkestenbaum.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Megan Grumbling writes poetry, criticism and essays, and dramatic works, and serves as an editor, teacher, and writing mentor. Her second poetry collection, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, launched in fall of 2020 from Acre Books. Her first collection, Booker's Point (UNT 2016), was awarded the Vassar Miller Prize and the Maine Book Award for Poetry.

Her work has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Award from the Robert Frost Foundation, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and a St. Boltoph Emerging Artist Award, and has been included in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, the New York Times Poetry Pairing Series, and Verse Daily.

As a filmmaker, she is co-director/producer with David Camlin of We Are the Warriors (2023), which follows members of a Maine high school community as they grapple with ingrained settler narratives about their Native American mascot and the difficult conversation of whether to retire the image. We Are The Warriors was awarded the Tourmaline Prize for best feature at the 2023 Maine International Film Festival. Megan also wrote and co-directed the short film and cultural allegory Carrying Place, a Sisters Grumbling production.

Megan is also the librettist of the spoken opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, a co-creation with the late composer Denis Nye, and of which her newest collection is an expansion. This experimental opera had its world premiere production by Hinge/Works Modern Opera in 2016 at SPACE Gallery, in Portland, Maine. She now works regularly with composer Marianna Filippi on a variety of environmentally-themed new music compositions, including a synesthetic exploration of a day in the life of an octopus and a work for 8 cellos and chorus written in the voice of a glacier.

She has written and directed interactive street theater for the sea level rise consciousness-raising group King Tide Party and collaborated on site-specific performances about healing and sound. Her dramatic and operatic work as co- founder of Hinge/Works has been staged as part of the PortFringe Festival, the Sacred and Profane Festival, and the Belfast Poetry Festival.

Megan also edits the weekly poetry column Deep Water in the Portland Press Herald; serves as Reviews Editor for The Café Review, a poetry and arts journal; and wrote theater and film criticism for the Portland Phoenix from 2004 until the alt-weekly’s sad final demise in 2024. She teaches at the University of New England and Southern Maine Community College, frequently leads writing workshops and tutorials, and offers manuscript consultations and editing services to a range of authors. She earned a Master’s Degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University’s School of Journalism, and studied oral history, ethnography, and American Studies as an undergraduate at The Evergreen State College.

Megan’s work is strongly influenced by the natural world, stories, and documentary modes. She has written a portrait-in-verse of an old Maine woodsman; explored the significance of gold in America through the voices of three historical figures; and contemplated how we inhabit the vessels of a neighborhood, a body, and the deep and precarious blue.

Learn more at megangrumbling.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of ten books, including Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory, Half/Life: New and Selected Poems, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and Birdwatching in Wartime. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Christian Barter’s fourth book of poetry, The Ends, is published by Littoral Books. He has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Maine Literary Award for Poetry, the Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions, and he was the Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park. For over thirty years he has worked for the Acadia trail crew as a stone worker, rigger, arborist and supervisor.

Learn more at www.christianbarterpoetry.org.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

She’s the author of three award-winning books: the novel The Last Whaler (Regal House Publishing, September 2024), the novel-in-stories Falling Through the New World (Gold Wake Press 2024), and the novella Badlands (Miami University Press 2007). Reeves’s short stories, poetry, and essays have been widely published. Most recently, three of her Maine-based poems appear in Echoes in the Fog: Reflections on the Liminal Spaces of Maine’s Coast (12 Willows Press). 

A Hawthornden Fellow, she’s been awarded residencies to the Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, Spitsbergen Artists Residency, Art & Science in the Field, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, she taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College’s MFA program. She serves on the board at Millay House Rockland and lives in Camden, Maine.

Learn more at: www.cynthiareeveswriter.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Arisa White is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. She is the author of Who’s Your Daddy, co-editor of Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers. Post Pardon: The Opera marked Arisa’s debut as a librettist, and the libretto is forthcoming from Ecstatic Motion Press in 2026. 

Her poetry is widely published, and her collections have been nominated for both the NAACP (N-double-A-C-P) Image Award and the Lambda Literary Award. She has also won the Per Diem Poetry Prize, the Maine Literary Award, the Nautilus Book Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, the Golden Crown Literary Award, and the Airlie Press Prize. The poem installation, look after your heart, is permanently displayed at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. She is a Cave Canem fellow and serves on the Community Advisory Board for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Learn more at arisawhite.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Claire Millikin is a poet and long-distance runner originally from Georgia (USA), and now lives in coastal Maine. The author of ten poetry collections, including Magicicada, a book of poems about juvenile solitary confinement and winner of the 2024 Foreword Indies Award for Poetry, Millikin’s recognitions also include an Independent Press Award Distinguished Favorite and the WB Yeats’ Society Prize. Claire teaches art history and writing for the University of Maine system and for the Maine Media Workshops and College. Learn more at: www.claireraymond.org.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features Maya Williams (ey/em, they/them, she/her), whose work covers suicide awareness, mental health, faith, entertainment media, grief, interpersonal relationships, intimate partner violence, and healing. Ey reads eir poems: "On Building an Assignment at Birth," "On Building a Shrine," "Feminine Morbidity, " and "For Wanda Coleman's 'Wicked Enchantment'".

Maya Williams is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently an Ashley Bryan Fellow, a Creative Fellow of the University of New England's Maine Women Writers Collection, and was selected as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine  for a July 2021 to July 2024 term.

Maya's debut poetry collection, Judas & Suicide, is available through Game Over Books. Eir second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date, is available through Harbor Editions.  Maya's third poetry collection, a chapbook: What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway? , is available via Garden Party Collective.  Their fourth poetry collection, a chapbook: Feminine Morbidity is available through The Headlight Review. 

Maya's collections are a finalist of a New England Book Award, a finalist of a Maine Literary Award, a winner of Garden Party Collective's chapbook contest, and a winner of The Headlight Review's chapbook contest respectively. Ey were also a recipient of the Maine Humanities Council's Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2024. 

Catch Maya hosting the hybrid open mic series Port Veritas on Tuesday nights and hosting the hybrid writing workshop series at Novel Maine on Sunday mornings. You can support Maya's poetry on eir Patreon page and follow eir work at mayawilliamspoet.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Dr. Therí A. Pickens received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She is a poet-scholar who focuses on Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature and Disability Studies. Dr. Pickens is currently the Charles A Dana Professor of English & Africana at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí A. Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. 

Learn more at: www.tpickens.org

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

John Reinhart has been awarded the Dark Poetry Scholarship from the Horror Writers Association, Reinhart's poems and short works have been published internationally in print and online. He has been nominated for the Rhysling Award for best science-fiction poem in the previous year and the Dwarf Stars Award for the best short sci-fi poem of the previous year. He has won the Poetry Nook weekly contest seven times.

Reinhart's eight books to date span a wide range of his work, ranging from dark sci-fi/horror to humorous scenes from his family life, to experimental word compositions, and more serious social commentary. 

You can earn more on John's website: https://home.hampshire.edu/~jcr00/reinhart.html

Sign up for John Reinhart's Patreon content here: https://www.patreon.com/johnreinhart

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Kristen Lindquist attended Middlebury College in Vermont and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. Her poetry and other writings have appeared in such venues as Down East magazine, Maine Times, and Bangor Daily News, as well as in many literary/haiku journals and anthologies. Her haiku chapbook It Always Comes Back was a winner of the 2020 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award. Her haiku collection ISLAND, published in 2023, was runner-up for the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award.

Learn more at www.kristenlindquist.com, where you can sign up for Kristen's daily haiku newsletter.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

This is the last episode of Season 5. Poetry Medicine for the Soul will back in the fall with Season 6. 

Meg Weston is a poet, non-fiction writer, and photographer with passion for the geological processes that shape the earth and the stories that shape our lives. She has an MFA from Lesley University. As co-founder of The Poets Corner, and the Camden Festival of Poetry, and a board member of Millay House Rockland, Meg actively supports the poetry community. Images can be seen on her photography website, www.volcanoes.com. 

Meg Weston's poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her publications include a poetry collection, Magma Intrusions, published by Kelsay Books in 2023, a self-published chapbook, Letters from the White Queen. and a collaborative collection with poet Margaret Haberman, To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Annaliese Jakimides has been cited in national competitions by poets laureate and other notable writers. Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her prose and poetry have been published in many magazines, anthologies, and journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal and Southeast Review. She’s a member of MWPA’s community advisory board and cofounder of the Belfast Poetry Festival. After decades of living in the shadow of Mt. Katahdin in a town of 160, pumping water by hand, she now lives in an apartment in a small Maine city overlooking a library and writes in a closet. Learn more at www.annaliesejakimides.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Mike Bove is the author of four books of poetry, most recently EYE. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and others. He was a two-time finalist for a Maine Literary Award and won the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest in 2021. In 2024 he served as Writer-in-Residence at Acadia National Park. Currently, he is editor of Hole in the Head Review, a biannual journal of poetry. Mike lives with his family in Portland, Maine where he was born and raised, and is Professor of English at Southern Maine Community College. 

Learn more at: www.mikebove.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Katherine Hagopian Berry (she/her) is the author of Mast Year (Littoral Books 2020), LandTrust (NatureCulture, 2022) and Orbit (Toad Hall Editions, 2023). Katherine has appeared in literary magazines, including Café Review, SWWIM, and Feral, in the Portland Press Herald, on Maine NPR and in multiple anthologies. Her next collection, Handfast, is forthcoming from NatureCulture Books.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Rosa Lane is author of four poetry collections including Called Back, published by Tupelo Press in fall 2024; Chouteau’s Chalk, winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019;Tiller North, winner of the National Indie Excellence Award, published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2016; and Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook. 

Her work was named Best of Poetry for the 2024 Geminga Prize, chosen as winner of the 2023 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, and selected finalist for the 2023 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition among other awards. Rosa Lane’s poems have appeared in Cloudbank, Five Points, Nimrod, RHINO, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

Learn more at: www.rosalane.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Lauren Saxon is a queer, Black poet and engineer living in Portland, ME. She loves her cats, her Subaru, and being chronically online. Lauren’s work is featured in Barrelhouse, Empty Mirror, Across the Margin, Homology Lit, and more. Her debut chapbook, You’re My Favorite, won the 2023 Maine Literary Award for Book of Poetry, and is out now with Thirty West Publishing.

Learn more at: www.laurenmsaxon.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Kristen Case is a poet and scholar. She is the author of American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe, and three books of poetry - most recently, Daphne. She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers. Most recently, the Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau. She lives in Maine. 

Learn more at: www.kristencase.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Jefferson Navicky was born in Chicago and grew up in Southeastern Ohio. He earned his M.F.A. from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodies Poetics at Naropa University. He is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023), a Finalist for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021) won the 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry.

Jefferson’s work has received several acknowledgments and awards, including an American Rescue Plan/Maine Project Grant, a Maine Arts Commission grant, and three Maine Literary Awards. His plays have been produced throughout New England. Jefferson is proud to be a member of Maine’s literary arts community and is active in several volunteer boards, committees, and community projects. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.

Learn more at: www.jeffersonnavicky.com.

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This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Margaret A. Haberman lives and writes in Belfast, Maine. Her poems have appeared in the Island Journal, the journals Spiritus, and kerning/ a space from here. Her poems have also been selected for the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here. Margaret and Meg Weston co-authored a book of poems, To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems, which came out in 2024. 

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Kate Kearns is the author of You Are Ruining My Loneliness (Littoral Books, 2023), and a chapbook called How to Love an Introvert (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Maine Women Magazine, the Maine Sunday Telegram “Deep Waters” section, and on Maine Public Radio’s “Poems from Here”. Her poems have also been published in Salamander, Peregrine, Northern New England Review, Sugar House Review and elsewhere. Kate was a finalist for the 2024 Charles Simic Poetry Prize and the 2024 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest. She earned her MFA from Lesley University and BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Learn more at: www.katekearns.com.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers. His second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. His poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, The Literary Review, FIELD, Poetry Northwest and Orion. Gibson’s prose has appeared in Guernica, Kenyon Review, Publishers Weekly, Slice, and other places. 

He served as the City of Portland’s fifth Poet Laureate, ending a three-year term in 2018. His projects included Written, Spoken, Rapped, a multimedia website that he collaborated on with poet Wesley McNair and that is aimed at high school teachers and students interested in writing poetry, and “Deep Water,” a column that features a poem each Sunday in the Maine Sunday Telegram and now continues with poet Megan Grumbling as editor. 

With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, he has taught writing at conferences, schools and universities including Fordham, Haystack, and University of Southern Maine, and helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks Artist Colony. He currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland with his family.

Learn more at: www.gibsonfayleblanc.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Sarah V. Schweig’s second book, The Ocean in the Next Room, won the Jake Adam York Prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in January 2025. Her first book, Take Nothing with You, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2016. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Tin House, and the Yale Review, among others. Her critical essays have appeared at Public Seminar, Tourniquet Review, and elsewhere. She works as an editor and is writing a philosophy dissertation for her PhD at the New School for Social Research on the value of poetry. She lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband and son. Learn more at: www.sarahvschweig.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

James Davis is the author of the poetry collection Club Q, which won the Anthony Hecht Prize. His poems have been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio, as well as in publications like Best New Poets, The Sewanee Review, Copper Nickel, Five Points, and Pleiades. He lives in Denton, Texas, where he teaches English at the University of North Texas. Find him online at jamesdavispoet.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Andrea Deeken (she/they) is the author of the chapbook, Mother Kingdom, winner of the 2021 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition and 2022 International Book Awards finalist. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of journals including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Beyond Queer Words, The Blue Mountain Review, erbacce Journal UK, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among others. A former book editor, she has worked for Multnomah County Library for nearly two decades. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. Learn more about Andrea at andreadeeken.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Angela Dribben is an astrologer, editor, and writer living in the Appalachian region of Virginia. She’s on the Teaching Artist roster with Virginia Commission for the Arts. She co-founded Great Goodness—a YouTube show highlighting the good creatives put into the world. Her debut collection is Everygirl (Main Street Rag). Her writing can be found at Orion, Los Angeles Review of Books, Westchester Review, and many other places. Find Angela at www.twodogtarot.com and @Great_Goodness on YouTube.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Julia Bouwsma is Maine’s sixth state Poet Laureate. Julia lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine where she works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian. She is Maine’s sixth Poet Laureate, currently serving a term from 2021 to 2026, and is the author of three poetry collections: the forthcoming Death Fluorescence (Sundress Publications, June 2025), Midden (Fordham University Press, 2018), and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). 

She is also the librettist for the short chamber opera, Ghost Apples, created in collaboration with composer Nathan Davis and to be performed by the Halcyon Quartet in the fall of 2025. Bouwsma’s honors include a 2024 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and two Maine Literary Awards. Her work can be found in various publications including Ecotone, Green Mountains Review, Kenyon Review, Plume, and Poetry Daily. She has taught in the Creative Writing department at the University of Maine at Farmington, serves on the Community Advisory Board for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and works as the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, ME.

Learn more at www.juliabouwsma.com/

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

In my throat

By Angela Dribben

Another life. Lungs of the forest. Roots pulse comforts to one another.

The first one to die bequeaths all they once lived for. Were we once

trees? We clamber to find one another. Is it our palms listening, held hot

to bark—one risen rough and rigid, one smooth as the Earth’s tilt. A trust

of one another before we ever pressed together flesh, mine to yours.

You’re the only one I’ve never known how to leave. The only one

i ever rooted into. My anchor. My source. Your Magnolia

bark the antidote to my anxiety. Your seed my pain

killer, fever reducer. Grandiflora. Salve for soft-bellies.

i, your Oak. My medicine your astringent. Your remedy.

My canopy your shelter, come October a mantel of auburn and gold

to hang your worries on. When steeped & distilled your conelike flowers

ward off Autumnal fever—i am your barn, your barrel, your ship, your bed.

This pulsing through the earth. This way we ache

for one another. Otherworld, Underworld, in another life.

Our ancestors Hickory, Poplar, Dogwood, Redbud, medicines

of the earth, muladhara of the earth. Hyphae calling us home.

Not About Weather or Onions or the Poem You Wrote Twenty-four Years Ago Today                      

(After reading Ted Kooser’s poem, “March 11” in Winter Morning Walks)

by Caren Stuart

With the light of this day so brilliantly bright

and the tease of these clouds so delicately white,

and the dancing of this sky such a breezy delight,

it’s the blueness of the blue in the height of this high

that’s impossible to pen, with its piercing infinity

so inviting the seeking of my soul and mind’s eye today.

I have set a timer for an hour of concrete

writing in this room full of windows

and hot tea and candles and a plate full

of slices of peanut buttered Honeycrisp apple.

With the whispering warm of mid-March

settling deep into soil here, teasing the delicate

sleep of small bulbs to stir into stretching

even their slenderest, tenderest shoots

into growing up into sweet as scallion

or savory as onion, i feel so ensconced

in my own so seemingly fragile, so delicately

layered, so almost translucent, papery skins. This

is mostly to say that this sky is so full of itself,

it is filling me up. Up. And away. Today.

And yesterday. And tomorrow and back

into all of the yesterdays ever. Yours.

Or mine. Yours AND mine. It’s that good...

even though I can’t begin to begin to write

adequately about any of this... ever... at all.

You wrote a poem: March 11

(twenty-four years ago today)

I received it and this:

all

of this...

Angela Dribben is an astrologer, editor, and writer living in the Appalachian region of Virginia. She writes to gain a better understanding of anything and everything and to connect with others. Reading was her first best friend. She’s been published in a myriad of journals and magazines. She teaches generative writing classes centered on healing through the Virginia Commission for the Arts and independently. Reach out to her, find out about classes, share your writing with her. She can be found at www.twodogtarot.com and on Medium @angeladribben.

Caren Stuart is a lifelong North Carolinian currently living with her husband in the wilds of Chatham County where she reads poetry daily and writes poetry almost daily. As often as possible she wanders and ponders the woods, creates random art and craft works, and helps bring online and in person poetry and art experiences to others. More than sixty of her poems have appeared in assorted journals, anthologies, and collections of award-winning poems. Find Caren on facebook as herself and on Instagram as @convolutednotionsbycarenstuart.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Whales

By Kathryn Petruccelli

I have a photo of my mother in a gray hoodie on a boat—a whale watching trip. We see a few tails at a distance. Regardless, for the five-hour duration, she holds her camera to her eye, with the exception of this moment, when I take her picture.

In another version, the boat rocks wildly in the wake of all the breaching; squeals from excited tourists create a din. I have to shout to my mother. She turns toward me, my photo a brief interruption to her agenda: she clicks and clicks at the splashing.

Let’s say this time the water is glass. Far off on the horizon, what might be a small spray from a blowhole, maybe a second. A pod moving off. My mother is nonetheless enthralled, wind buffeting us. She anchors herself, turns and smiles, and that’s when I snap the picture.

What I left out before is that the boat zooms to a likely spot before the captain cuts the motor. Soon, a female humpback sidles up next to us and goes to sleep. The crew calls it “extraordinary” over the PA system. The boat lists to one side while every passenger aboard leans out over open ocean to try to get a photo. Eventually, mom and I give up our spots to let others see. We shake our heads in awe. She poses on the opposite rail, empty of people, and I shoot off a bunch of pictures. The one I like best I frame and station in the living room. After several years and two moves, I forget the details of the trip. At some point, I slide the picture out of its smart black metal and replace it with one of the kids posing in Halloween costumes.

The truth is, it’s off season. There are no other tourists on the deck. The few who came are inside eating Doritos; the wind is cold and mom and I alone brave it. Even though right out of the docks we had dolphins following the boat’s wake, now all is quiet minus an occasional cormorant overhead. It isn’t until we’re almost back at the harbor, the crew apologetic, naturalist going on and on about breeding habits, that I think to aim my camera at mom, who smiles obligingly, tells me she doesn’t mind about the whales, it was still a thrill just to be on the water.

There is no boat. Mom and I stand on sand and squint in the direction the German man pointed. We can only make out white crests on a choppy sea. Mom pulls her hood on and focuses her lens on hermit crabs in the tidepool. I’ve forgotten my camera in the car. Tomorrow she will fly home across the country and I will see her again once more before the day I arrive at the hospital and kiss her cheek. She’ll leave me a letter that says, It was enough.

Limoncini

By Paola Bruni

The small craters of the sun-tipped Villafranca

lemon, bitter to the tongue.

Perhaps, my grandmother would say,

a propagation like the Sicilians themselves—

too much salt in the air. The fruit has a pale

oval neck, an inconspicuous nipple.

To her, it was a stunted variety, as I feared

was I. My breasts, she termed limoncini,

a pair of petite sour fruits I’d inherited

from my father’s side. For hers were classically

Primofiore, a strain of lemon excessive

in their fleshy countenance. In my adolescence,

she took to pinching my nipples between

her thumb and forefinger.

I implored my mother to intervene.

But on the subject of breasts, she spoke only

to say, You didn’t want my milk,

my infant lips refusing to suckle.

When the surgeons took my mother’s

left breast, I was eighteen

and filled with remorse. Does rejection

grow invasive roots?

Grandmother developed an attraction

for the ample, thick-rind Genoa and Lisbon

species. On special occasions, the Limetta

was sought, a sweet incestuous marriage

of the Eureka lemon and Mexican lime.

She served fricassea di vitella, cotolette

di maiale fritte, crostata di limone—dishes

so rife with lemony hues, every meal lifted

to a bright archipelago. We did not understand

the lemon’s complex vocabulary, or how deeply

its seeds were sown. By the time I left college,

Grandmother stopped referring to my breasts

as limoncini. Instead, un pecato, a shame.

She worried I would not mate, would not propagate.

How often I thought of her through my barren,

childless years. Grandmother was long gone

when Mother’s right breast was trimmed away.

She was left no foliage to soak up the warmth

of the world, only pale pink branches

that spread across her chest.

KATHRYN PETRUCCELLI is a Pushcart-, Best of the Net-, and Best Small Fictions-nominated poet with roots in spoken word and a degree in teaching English language learners. Her poetry has appeared in places like the Massachusetts Review, Whale Road Review, RHINO, About Place Journal, and Anacapa Review. You can find her prose at places like SweetLit, Switch, Fictive Dream, The Los Angeles Review, and Wrong Turn Lit. Kathryn recently relocated with her family to the west of Ireland which she enjoys greatly, besides missing her former job as tour guide at the Emily Dickinson Museum. She teaches online, pay-what-you-can workshops that aim to build community. Come say hello via her website: poetroar.com, or at her Substack newsletter, Ask the Poet.

PAOLA BRUNI is originally from San Francisco and now lives in Aptos, California by the sea. She began writing poetry in 2016 after a long marketing career. Pushcart nominated, her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, The Birmingham Review, Rattle, Adroit, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize and the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest judged by Ellen Bass. Her first book of poetry titled how do you spell the sound of crickets is an epistolary collection written with the late poet, Jory Post, and published by Paper Angel Press. Paola is also co-author of the nonfiction book, Let God Love You Up, published by the Maria Press. Read more at paolabruniwriter.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

“HEAR THE OFFSPRING AND 311 COVER EACH OTHER’S HITS”

By Scott Cunningham

-SPIN magazine tweet, July 19, 2018

I can’t help it. I’m always already driving down Military Trail, listening

to the Offspring or 311, the CD pulled into its slot like a sunset

or it’s 90 degrees in December and I’m wearing Doc Martins and a flannel, the one

speckled yellow and purple, the sight of me leaving: an ornate sunset.

That sound you hear is either a mosquito or a bulldozer tearing down Bo’s U-Pick

the Boca Mall, La Vieille Maison—that’s French for, You missed the sunset.

My palm was created to hold a bottle of Zima, the cord of a landline, the wheel

of a two-door Honda. Dear October in Mizner Plaza, I miss your sunsets.

I don’t know who tells the tide to obey the sea wall’s edge, what keeps

the row of sea grapes from being crushed by the weight of the sunset.

No one wants the last house on the street, the one pushed up against

the highway’s retaining wall, a florescent bulb instead of a sunset.

Our house spackles its wounds with water from the canal out back.

From my perch on the roof, I watch a sugar fire cook up a brackish sunset.

The mangroves walk north together, their smell overpowering the smoke.

Her mouth hits mine, and what is that taste, if not the sunset?

Our diving board is the train bridge that crosses over the Hillsboro canal.

We wait for the horn, the light through the pines, then outrace the sunset.

In Florida, breathing means swallowing, as if the sky were being poured.

The flood they talk about already happened. Drowning predates the sunset.

Pushed aside like fallen snow, water in the peninsula piles up in pools

in ponds, in coolers. It says, Wait. I’m not done yet.

To love this state, you have to divest yourself from tomorrow.

Bail out your hope. Slow your heart rate to the sunset’s.

They’ll build strip malls here until the town loses its name

then landless, they’ll incorporate the sunset.

I’ll leave enough sweat behind that the fish will call me, Father.

My billboard says, Every burial in Florida—an inverted sunset.

I don’t need to hear the Offspring and 311 cover each other’s hits.

I witnessed the dawn. I don’t want to see the sunset.

Miami Vacation!

By Sarah Trudgeon

I am on the balcony of 275

looking at a flamboyant tree

and shadowy early people

moving through the halls and windows

and the fountain is going below

and its fat koi. Every night

I dream of our old apartment.

Last week I dreamed I saw an owl in a tree in a window

and made everybody look,

and we got closer and the tree was actually inside,

and the owl was actually a baby

and I plucked him down.

My mom’s beach shorts hanging on a fake Ficus

flutter in the breeze.

An iguana crashes around in the palm fronds.

A house gecko stuck on the wall like a spy starts and stops.

80% of animals are nematodes.

Aaron took the baby for a walk.

Everyone else is asleep.

Yesterday Saul stepped on a bee.

Yesterday I smashed my finger in the door jamb

now it’s purple and blue and going to fall off.

I bought a new water bottle.

Sid locked himself in the pool bathroom

but Aaron heard him yelling.

My mom said the seawater cleaned

her rings and I rolled my eyes but now I see

my rings are also clean.

“Listen to this,” she says

and I know it is going to be some tragedy

about a neighbor—

Died of a Tylenol overdose.

Has four months to live.

Became an alcoholic

after the hurricane.

Her husband’s father cut him out of his will.

“He’s such a sweet man,” says Aaron. A sweet man.

I love that Aaron said that.

And the way he said it.

An Australian woman and her New Jersey husband

call and try to order Cuban sandwiches on the beach

but the place only has croissants.

They pass a pink vape pen back and forth

and mutter about their daughter

taking selfies on the sandbar.

My toes are a little sunburned.

The baby and I go to the Winn Dixie

and get everything.

Are these other parents better than me?

Do I leave my towel here to save this chair?

I thought a guy on the beach was muscly

but he’s not.

I think of so many Fun Things to do with the kids.

The vultures soar. I drink my coffee fast.

Old Ironsides is a ship made of live oak

that couldn’t be blasted by cannons in the war of 1812.

Everyone is coughing.

We get pizza and the baby chews on a crust.

Earlier I said, “Let’s get pizza, the baby can chew on a crust.”

A palm warbler and an iguana

hang out in the Bermuda grass.

Sid keeps making fortune tellers

but he has a unique understanding of fortune—

You win. You lose. 40 unicorns. NBA.

The laundry in the dryer

was still wet this morning.

I run on the beach where I used to run and dream

of a husband and a baby.

Somebody finds me.

The baby plays with the kitchen utensils.

I buy a $48 bottle of wine that I don’t drink.

Aaron saves our spot on the beach.

The bakery is too busy to even get into.

The Seychelles tortoise can live to be 250 years old.

The two at the zoo are only 100.

The oldest human is 118.

Hey, look at the water! Look at the sunrise!

I nurse the baby in my wet bathing suit.

Last night I dreamed that I drove myself off the map.

My mind drifts towards to-do lists,

sad little gray clouds.

On the plane there is a sea of glowing

white cloud cover, meaning the world below is gray.

Mosquito bites.

Black and blue finger.

The kids are awake.

But I thought I’d lost the cap to my new water bottle,

but minutes before we left, the baby found it.

P. SCOTT CUNNINGHAM is the author of Self-Portrait as the “I” in Florida, winner of the 2025 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, selected by Major Jackson and forthcoming in 2026 from Autumn House Press. His debut collection, Ya Te Veo (University of Arkansas, 2018), was selected by Billy Collins for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. Ya Te Veo was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in The Nation, American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, POETRY, A Public Space, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Monocle, and The Guardian, among others. Born and raised in South Florida, he is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the founder of the O, Miami Poetry Festival. He lives with his family in Illinois. Learn more at pscottcunningham.com.

SARAH TRUDGEON is the author of Dreams of Unhappiness and The Plot Against the Baby. Her poems and other writing have appeared in Bennington Review, Eight Miami Poets, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Paris Review, The TLS, The Yale Review, and more. She is the literary director of The Mastheads and lives in Great Barrington, MA. Learn more at sarahtrudgeon.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Focus on the Family, 1996

By James Davis

i.

The family was a scatterplot

through which I drew a trending line

that pointed toward an origin

that I called God. But it was not

an unambiguous data set.

What the hell was a “third cousin”?

I’d met one at that year’s reunion.

We watched the Olympics and got wet

scoring each other’s cannonballs

into the Hilton’s peopled pool.

I plotted his coordinates

beneath a friend from middle school

who met me in the bathroom stalls,

where we ignored each other’s zits.

ii.

The family watched a VHS

in which James Dobson rapped with teens.

He cracked some jokes. He wore blue jeans

and doffed his hat to horniness.

His wife and he had intercourse

three times a week. [Off-screen groans.]

Condoms were ineffective screens.

against both AIDS and syphilis.

We watched him in the family room,

my brother, father, stepmom, me.

Beneath us, in the sofa bed,

the mattress squashed a fieldmouse, dead

among his droppings. The TV

shed its blue light on the tomb.

iii.

The family joined in silent prayer

for the hostages to be released,

for the bomb strapped to the gunman’s chest

to be a dud, for hands in the air.

He’d been a construction worker there

and compound-fractured his left wrist.

He was seeing a psychiatrist.

He didn’t feel provided for.

The family said, tough luck, big guy.

You poke the bear, you get the claws.

The family wasn’t without cause

to want revenge. Neither was I.

I’d gotten a B on my algebra test.

Of all of us, I hated best.

iv.

The family voted for Bob Dole.

We saw in him a gravitas;

in the incumbent, a literal ass.

We tsktsked every exit poll.

I swallowed Gardetto’s pieces whole

to punish my esophagus.

It wouldn’t be my only loss

that year, but it would be the rule:

Democracy won’t do God’s plan.

Alone, I graphed parabolas

and found their curvature consoling.

They spent half of forever falling

into the lowest point there was

until forever started up again.

Free Country

By Jessica Hammack  

My childhood wasn’t so bad. I had a stack  

of Noxzema pads, a trundle bed.

I had ketchup sandwiches, and a yard,  

a ditch where onions grew, fat and purple.

Back then my teachers said war was good

for the economy, and instead of I don’t care  

my friends and I would say Free country,

as if that gave us permission to do anything

we wanted, like hock loogies out the bus window,

or say that we, too, could become President

someday, despite all evidence to the contrary.

To me, the sweater of America

had only just begun unraveling: imagine,  

I had never seen a murder on a telephone.  

I hadn’t even heard of student loans,

or proxy wars, or mortgages gone underwater.

I used to draw the ocean full of smiling fish.  

I had a crush on Officer Kip, the DARE cop,  

who, the first week of class, set out a box

that said, in navy Sharpie, Tell Me Everything.

From my assigned seat, I wrote what I was told.

I used to think that growing up meant being free.

That I could choose my life. I really thought

that they would ask, and I could just say no.

JAMES DAVIS is the author of the poetry collection Club Q, which won the Anthony Hecht Prize. His poetry has been featured on NBC News and CBC Radio and anthologized in two installments of Best New Poets (2011 and 2019). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Five Points, Literary Matters, Salamander, The Sewanee Review, and other notable venues. Originally from Colorado Springs, he lives in Denton, Texas, where he teaches English at the University of North Texas. Learn more at www.jamesdavispoet.com.

JESSICA HAMMACK is from Morgantown, West Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, The Baltimore Review, Poet Lore, and other journals. She holds a BA in English literature from Hiram College, an MFA from the University of Florida, and an MLIS from the University of Maryland. She works as the head of research and instruction at the Beneficial-Hodson Library in Frederick, Maryland. 

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

In this episode, Karren brings together poets from From the Belly Volume II: Poets respond to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, Food. The poets huddle their significant creative talents to respond to Stein’s most mysterious work and launch into a conversation about the hard to penetrate Food section of Tender Buttons.

These poems are from From the Belly Volume II: Food, a collection of poetry responding to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. 

Karren Lalonde Alenier is author of eight poetry collections—latest: how we hold on from Broadstone Books, 2021—and editor or co-editor of three anthologies, including From the Belly, volumes I and II. Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On, her jazz opera with composer Bill Banfield premiered June 2005 in New York by Encompass New Opera Theatre. More at alenier.com.

Tara Betts is the author of Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, and Arc & Hue. She served as the inaugural Poet for The People Practitioner Fellow at the University of Chicago. Betts currently teaches full-time in Peace Studies at DePaul University and serves as poetry editor for The Langston Hughes Review. Learn more on the faculty page of DePaul’s  Peace, Justice, Conflict Studies Department.
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is the author of Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022) and Ubasute (Slapering Hol Press, 2021). His honors include a MacDowell145 Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award. His work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Plume Poetry, RHINO, and elsewhere. Learn more at aaroncaycedokimura.com.

Bernadette Geyer is author of the poetry collection The Scabbard of Her Throat (The Word Works) and editor of My Cruel Invention: A Contemporary Poetry Anthology (Meerkat Press). Her poems and translations have appeared in Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Geyer lives in Berlin, Germany. Learn more at bernadettegeyer.com.

Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, the first of which is Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize from The Word Works, and re-issued in a 20th anniversary second edition. His most recent collection is Said Not Said, from Graywolf Press. He lives in Arlington, MA. Learn more at fredmarchant.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Dear America

by Suzanne Frischkorn

It's time to teach my daughter how to shoot an arrow

How to use a knife

How to hit the center of a target

       It's bloody work, but she should know

It's time to teach her how to win a debate

While applying lipstick without a mirror

And how to hold her keys between her fingers in a parking lot

It's time for her to hit the weight room

Join the cross-country team

Cast a spell, literally and figuratively

And it's time for her to develop telekinesis and clairvoyance

It's time she knows to never leave her drink unattended

Never drink on an empty stomach

Never drink before her period

And maybe what I mean to say is—never drink alcohol period

It's time to learn that one day she might switch grocery stores

Because a guy on staff there gives her the creeps

And even if it's less convenient to travel across town

       It's always best to trust her intuition

It's time to teach her that when a grown man stares at her

New breasts, she is not the one who should feel ashamed

America, she's her mother's daughter

       She's got this
 

St. Anthony and Stephen Hawking Conspire to Maintain Order 

By Georgia Popoff

If this is true, what else is true? 

- Matthew Olzmann

In actual fact, nothing is solid. 

Or so I have been told. The universe is comprised

of a collection of molecules in close collaboration,

making space even more vast than we ever assumed.

This makes me cautious when climbing

on my desk to hang a portrait of St. Francis de Sales

the patron saint of writers

What if I fell through? Where would I land? 

Months before the Twin Towers defied the logic of solid steel, 

I spent a week in Tuscany wandering through vineyards

and cathedrals. The day before I traveled south to Rome,

my white gold toe ring was suddenly absent.

I tore the bed apart, retraced my steps.

Then I remembered the pray to St. Anthony.

Then I recalled dangling my feet in the deep end of a pool,

while staring across the valley striped with olives and grapes.

The tiny circle rested at the bottom near the drain.

The caretaker saw it too. He trundled to his shed, returning

with a long pole, a crooked nail pounded into the end. 

His arm elbow deep, he fished for gold to answer my prayer. 

Rome was crazed. Soccer is truth to Romans. Their team won 

the Italian Cup for the first time in seventeen years.

Families flooded streets, flowing towards Circus Maximus. 

Tributaries all heading to the sea.

I stopped on a stone wide as a manhole cover

rounded to a blue-gray mound. How many feet

did it take to wear away all those tight molecules?

No one else seemed to care. 

My companion and I were in search of pasta,

wading against the current. Up a cobblestone alley, 

a tiny chapel spilled forth a wedding party, the bride 

bright as gold, her groom beaming at his good fortune. 

White calla lilies lined the aisle at the ends of the pews. 

The walls bore saints in frames of the same warm wood,

a brass offering box before each, a slim slot

just wide enough to accept a coin or folded bill.

Close to the door, stoic St. Anthony drew me to a halt. 

I pulled cash from a spot close to my heart. Reserving 

enough for a meal, I pressed lire into a neat package.

Tonight, the Tokyo news tells the cable world a distraught father

dives beneath the waves in Fukushima, searching for a miracle,

a gold ring, a shoe, any hint of his daughter swallowed by the sea. 

Swabbing a tombstone, he says, Each day I wash my face and her name. 

He never knew how to dive before this. Grief drove him to it. 

Once, he had a beloved. Then, in a space of a moment,

no trace. Beneath the breakers, remnants of walls, cars, bicycles,

evidence of the dead. All those molecules. The distance between 

never to be filled. Bones, heart, skin, stardust. 

Each life, a single cell in the expanse

claiming no boundary, no logic, agreeing to be true. 

Suzanne Frischkorn is a Cuban American poet and essayist. She is the author of four poetry books, most recently Whipsaw (Anhinga Press, 2024), and Fixed Star (JackLeg Press, 2022), as well as five chapbooks. She’s the recipient of The Writer’s Center Emerging Writers Fellowship for her book, Lit Windowpane, the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, and a Connecticut Individual Artist Fellowship. Her poems have recently appeared in Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Salamander, South Dakota Review, and Latino Poetry: A Library of America Anthology. She is an editor at $–Poetry is Currency, and an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org. Learn more at www.suzannefrischkorn.com

Georgia A. Popoff is a writer, editor, arts-in-education specialist, and a program coordinator for the YMCA of Central NY’s Writers Voice, where she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. Her fourth collection of poetry, Psychometry, released in late 2019 by Tiger Bark Press, was a finalist for Utica College’s Eugene Nassar Poetry Prize and the CNY Book Award for Poetry. Tiger Bark Press released her fifth collection, Living with Haints in spring 2024. In 2022, Georgia was named Poet Laureate of Onondaga County for a 3-year term of service, and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in 2024. She is the acquisitions editor for the University of Michigan Press Under Discussion book series on contemporary poets.

Learn more at www.georgiapopoff.com and www.poetshappydance.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Annie Lighthart is a poet and teacher who started writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest. She has taught at Boston College and with writers of all ages. Poems from her books Pax and Iron String have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and in various anthologies, including Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems and How to Love the World. Annie’s poems have been turned into music, used in meditation and healing projects in Ireland, England, and New Zealand, and have traveled farther than she has. She wishes they would take her with them. To learn more, visit annielighthart.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Dane Cervine is a Poet, Zen practitioner, and Therapist who lives in Santa Cruz, California along the Monterey Bay coast. 

Dane Cervine’s latest book is a contemplative travelogue titled DEEP TRAVEL - At home in the [Burning] World (published by Saddle Road Press). Other books include The World Is God’s Language (published by Sixteen Rivers Press), Earth Is a Fickle Dancer (Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press). Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California. 

Explore his website, danecervine.typepad.com, for his poetry, essays, published books, anthology & video selections, including free samples of his work. You can also browse his collection of books here.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Find Jennifer’s books from the links below:

Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree, order from Lily Poetry Review Books here

Dear Justice, order from Grey Book Press here.

All Things Are Born to Change Their Shapes, order from Small Harbor Publishing

The Queen of Queens order from Asterism here.

My Tarantella from Asterism here.

In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mate Press or Amazon

Learn more at jennmartelli.com. Follow Jennifer on Facebook or Instagram.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

The Redemption Center

By Margaret Haberman

What I wish I was doing was swimming

instead of standing outside of the redemption

center in the hot sun waiting with a small

tribe of strangers for our turn to go inside

the air conditioned building. That makes

it sound desirable. But AC is all that’s appealing

about the dark paneled room with a wall fridge

full of discount beer and the smell of old cigarettes

and alcohol. There’s a man inside with large

black trash bags full of bottles—you can’t

see what kind. Intriguing to wonder. I’m third

in line after he’s done,which doesn’t seem

like it’s going to be anytime soon.

At first those of us on the outside can look

through the open door and see the dim

interior and the dubious progress of the black

trash bags, but then someone closes the door

and we’re left in the heat and the sliver of shade

on the side of the parking lot where the roof hangs

down. So, we have to rely on peering through

the dirty glass of the door to see any hope

of getting this task done before noon.

All of us are waiting, this little community

of strangers who want or need a bit of cash,

so we’re going to wait in the hot sun in July

wondering how long it will be and if it’s worth

the wait. There’s some parable of business—

sunken costs—that has to do with investment

of time and money, I can’t remember how

I know that, but the longer I wait, the harder

it is to leave. The guy smoking unfiltered cigarettes

tells me that the dude inside with the black trash

bags has SEVEN bags which we later confirm

was only SIX when thirty minutes later

the contents have all been counted and the owner

of them, who’s kind of to blame for all of this,

comes out and I ask him, How much you get?

—74 dollars. Not bad for a morning of redemption.

By then one of us has given up, the woman

with streaked blonde hair and white wide leg

polyester pants, and five or six more people

have arrived, and finally I’m inside the inner

sanctum of the place along with the guy

who arrived just after me in the blue City

of Bangor truck. The man doing the counting

behind the counter finally finishes with the two

guys in front of me and decides to take a break

and disappears out back to who knows where,

comes back five minutes later and gets a bottled

water out of the tired fridge. He’s a big man

wearing a Kiss t-shirt with the sleeves cut off.

He’s had a few teeth pulled and a tattoo of a pine tree

and a star–an image that might soon be the new flag

of Maine. The guy behind me, City Truck Guy,

says just under his breath, He’s a little off

his game today.

I empty my bags one by one on the beer soaked

surface, trying not to look at what was inside

the bags my daughter gave me and think instead

of what other people have hidden in their bags,

what might be the significance of water bottles

and Bud Lights, which leads me back to my own

trash, and where it came from, and why it felt important

to stand here for almost an hour when I could

have been swimming, just to pocket fifteen dollars

and ten cents, and City Truck Guy looks around,

says to me, I could put this in my next novel.

The Island in the Middle  

By Meg Weston  

Six-hundred-acre Crawford Pond  

surrounds a 100 acre island.  

Clementine colored peaked caps

and sunflower yellow fringed hats  

of magical mushrooms, and  

slender white stems of Indian pipes

I haven’t seen since childhood–  

ghost plants silent on pine needle paths.  

I’ve tiptoed back to a time  

when the world was new,  

every plant a discovery  

every color saturated,  

none to be taken for granted.  

Ferns—green masses of them stretching  

from tree to tree carpeting the forest floor—  

I haven’t seen this many ferns since my mother  

first showed me their delicate fronds, pinneated  

petals extending from a central petiole—  

she shared her love of them,  

and mushrooms too—their  

potent to satisfy hunger, or  

power a poisoned demise.  

Her shadow lingers in the woods as I walk  

reminding me to to breathe in the scent  

of pine and pitch, the freshness  

of the lake. The wind picks up,  

delaying our return, forcing the kayak  

to fight the wind to remain in one place  

a little longer, to linger,  

to relish time.

Margaret A. Haberman lives and writes in Belfast, Maine. Her work has appeared in the Island Journal, the journal Spiritus, and Kerning. Her poems have also been selected for the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here. 

Meg Weston is the Founder, Director, and Host of The Poets Corner and co-founder/co-director of the Camden Festival of Poetry. In January 2020, Weston retired after 8 years as president of Maine Media College in Rockport, Maine. She previously held various leadership positions in the field of imaging, education, and journalism.

Meg Weston’s poetry expresses a passion for geological processes that shape the earth and the stories that shape our lives. Her obsession with volcanoes can be seen in photographs on her website www.volcanoes.com. After receiving an MFA in Creative Writing in creative non-fiction from Lesley University in 2008, she began to focus on and study the craft of poetry. Her first poetry collection, Magma Intrusions, was published in May 2023 by Kelsay Books, and a new collaborative work with Margaret Haberman, To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems, was released in May 2024. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, and in a chapbook, Letters from the White Queen. 

Margaret and Meg’s book To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems can be found on The Poets Corner website, in the “Shop.”

Follow The Poets Corner on Instagram @ThePoetsCornerMaine and Facebook at: ThePoetsCorner 

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Remix: The Paper Brigade

By Lisken Van Pelt Dus

The horrors of the Holocaust were met with various forms of resistance. [A] resistance group nicknamed the Paper Brigade... in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania's capital ... risked death, smuggling artwork, books and rare manuscripts - hiding them in underground bunkers.

[from 60 Minutes, “The Paper Brigade: Rescuing cultural artifacts during and after WWI,” CBS News, November 13, 2022]  

Gun, of totalitarianism. Bounty, but of totalitarianism. Evil filled in. So to the ghetto.

The ghetto had other ideas. Dug up the survive out of the brutal looting. Dug up the survive: this culture, these boxes. Materials the ghetto. 

Years, it encompassed. This is the absence that could never emerge from hiding. They set aside the scooped-empty heroes, homemade wheelbarrow and shovels. The building organ. The church now tunnel.

Anything in – saved. Anything needed for kindling, baroque arches, wiped out country. Dusty iron knocked down, the rubble a manuscript. 

Deliverer upon faded saved. Collection of works rescued and lives of beauty walking. Book Palace an absence that could never rubble. Erasure knocked down, became human of the burnt contraband. Surviving pages insisted books had blood. Vanished Book the war.

The other ideas, floor to the gun, rooms upon rooms. Paper could never, wasn’t bounty. Bellows the war, wiped out nexus of poetry, what you're not allowed. You weren't taught books. No. No.

Picture those Jews encompassed, amplified by Chagall. Insisting feet down, assessing and prescient. Their hiding places. Their hiding places. Fearing the so says who. Heard whispers. Documents would were killed.

The evil is full, the it encompassed. Yiddish voices the unexplored absence that stains. This unexplored Book absence out of the burnt readers, contraband community. 

These are the surviving pages. Homemade diapers sewn Nazi, sewn Red Army. The us there, awaiting renovation. Who we have. Who we have: the scooped fragments.

Small Pools in a Dry Río Grande

By Robin Scofield

The Great Blue Heron stays by the empty river

while the Divine explodes in every star.

A few minnows angle in pools left over from drought

as Divinity suffers. A father and son also fish

for the rare minnows to use as bait at the big lake

north of here, Elephant Butte. I try to figure out

how Divinity suffers while the dog bites the heads

off dead fish and romps through the small pools.

Four and a half billion years after a super-nova

rocked a cloud of dust and gas,

the heron nests in Afghan pines on the east bank.

An underground channel keeps the river alive

while the barest spark hints at the Divinity.

Some activists filed suit on behalf of the river.

The heron reflects by the small pools and considers

dancing as I wonder why no one sued in her name.

I follow heron footprints in dry sand, so much sand

in my shoes, it bruises my toes. The dog splashes

in small pools, and the heron flies off to her nest.

In slow wingbeats, I hear the Divine Rhythm.

Observed and unobserved, super-novae burst around us.

The pine trembles as she settles on a large branch,

scaly yellow feet around it, midnight wings folding.

Lisken Van Pelt Dus is the author of two full-length collections of poems, What We’re Made Of (Cherry Grove 2016) and How Many Hands to Home (Mayapple Press 2025), as well as two chapbooks, Everywhere at Once and Letters to My Dead. She was raised in England, the US, and Mexico, and now lives with her husband in western Massachusetts, where she is an award-winning teacher of writing, languages, and martial arts. Her work can be found in many journals, anthologies, and craft books, including recently Naugatuck River Review, The Comstock Review, and The Bond Street Review, and has earned several awards and Pushcart Prize nominations. Learn more at LVPDPoetry.com

Link to 60 Minutes news piece used in Lisken’s poem in this episode.

Robin Scofield is the author of Ridge of High Pressure (Mouthfeel Press, 2023), Flow (Street of Trees Projects, 2019), Sunflower Cantos (Mouthfeel Press, 2012), and a chapbook, And the Ass Saw the Angel (Mouthfeel Press, 2011). Flow was named Southwest Book of the Year. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Theology Today, and The Texas Observer. Currently, her work appears in The Fourth River, The Banyon Review, and the Border Beats Anthology. She writes with the Tumblewords Project in El Paso, Texas, where she lives with her husband, her son, a cranky cat, and a small dog.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Ruth, on the Purity, or Impurity, of Attention

by Megan McDermott

“Then Boaz said to the elders and all the people, ‘…I have also acquired Ruth the Moabite, the wife of Mahlon, to be my wife, to maintain the dead man’s name on his inheritance….’” – Ruth 4:9-10 (NRSV)

When Mahlon was alive,

I gave him his due, but not

what people give each other today.

That’s not how we thought,

marriage a matter of getting things done,

though the To-Do list never

shortened much: those babies

never born – our emptiness

like a tree that grew, year

by year, closer to the quiet God

in the sky who stayed unmoved

by our efforts.

At his deathbed, I said goodbye,

to him and the List of What Was Unachieved.

What was my point? Oh, attention,

affections, purity. They come

unbidden and unburdened

when there’s no list of what

you’re meant to produce. With Naomi,

there was no way to fall short,

no expectation of what I should

or could have given. I was free –

to give nothing or everything.

So I gave everything.

Getting there

By Millie Tullis

my husband questions the good historical centers like this do.

Kids come every year on a field trip and leave thinking

history sucks because they don’t want to touch a cow’s hot udder.

He did not want to touch the cow’s udder and is remembering

how the man dressed as a pioneer called them city slickers

when they lived ten minutes down the road.

I loved these field trips and saved babysitting money to return

in the summer. I made candles by running in a circle.

Imagined I was Laura Ingalls Wilder. Churned butter in a skirt.

The historical farm was his great great grandfather’s.

He says it’s not like this is that farm. Half the valley

was somebody’s farm a hundred years ago. When I was a kid here

we kept our eyes peeled for the adults working behind the scenes

who wore blue jeans and t-shirts like us. There are rules

about what clothing volunteers wear on the farm.

My husband did not know his great great grandfather had three wives

but he isn’t surprised. The first dead.

The next two in polygamy.

The second and third were sisters. They share one headstone nearby.

The sisters and the husband. The oldest sister who is the second wife buried

between her husband and sister.

They were both nineteen the years he married them.

I can’t stop digging up my dead men for judgment.

My great grandfather who had an affair

with his secretary after his round-faced wife gave birth

to nine-pound twins and lived. My mother remembers the skin

on this grandmother’s stomach hung over her aproned waist

like a long pancake. My third great grandfather

married his stepdaughter. My second great grandfather also

married his stepdaughter after raising her from the age of eight.

Tonight we do not enter the visitors center where the photograph

of my husband’s great great grandfather hangs.

We are walking to the open grass before

the too-clean-to-be-accurate mercantile storefront selling honey and rock candy

sticks to listen to the state-sponsored symphony perform

in the 125th year of Utah statehood.

We open our camping chairs above the earth

my husband’s great great grandmother walked.

The younger sister of her husband’s second wife

she married him in Mexico

three months before Wilford Woodruff’s revelation

renounced the practice of polygamy publicly

clearing the way for statehood.

Tonight the smoke from California’s fires reddens the setting sun

until the only lights left on are the stars

the stringed bulbs of the mercantile store

and the half domes of light letting the players see

the song they have already began to play.

Megan McDermott is the author of Jesus Merch: A Catalog in Poems, available now from Fernwood Press, Bookshop.org, Amazon, or your favorite indie/small bookstore. She is also the author of two chapbooks: Prayer Book for Contemporary Dating, available from Ethel Zine and Micro-Press, and Woman as Communion, available from Game Over Books.

Megan’s poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Christian Century, Rust + Moth, Rogue Agent Journal, Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, and The Cresset. She is also a poetry reader for one of her favorite online lit journals, Psaltery & Lyre. 

Learn more at meganmcdermottpoet.com. A link to the poem “Dear Ruth, on the Purity, or Impurity, of Attention” can be found here.

Millie Tullis (she/they) is a writer, editor, teacher, and researcher. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and an MA in American Studies & Folklore from Utah State University. Her digital micro-chap, Dream With Teeth, was published by Ghost City Press in 2023. Her poetry has been published in Sugar House Review, Stone Circle Review, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, SWWIM, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Millie is the Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal. Raised in northern Utah, she lives in upstate South Carolina. 

Learn more at millietullis.com. A link to the poem “Getting There” can be found here. 

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Rediscovery

By Amanda Russell  

I was told

not to write this.

Not yet. That I’d have

more to say years from now.

But I do not need

more to say.

There is no someday

like this day.

Mark it now:

When the kids

leave the house,

so will we. We’ll go

somewhere / anywhere,

maybe on a walk,

a long walk, a very

long walk and be gone

for months … we’ll walk

until we’ve left.

Until we’ve stepped

out of the roles

we’ve spent years

putting on. We’ll peel

them off like old skins,

let them drop

on sharp rocks. Tell me

we will make it

to then. Tell me every

evening, when we meet

in the kitchen

and wash the last

of the dishes

that we are

already

on our way.

Unforeseeable  

by Susan Ayres

Remember that one grain of grit can ruin a whole dish. —Katherine Anne Porter  

Sometimes an otherwise fine Greek  

meal will have grit in the spinach.  

Your plate overflows with pan-fried perch, sautéed  

baby portabella mushrooms, rice and spinach, when  

you comment, My, this spinach is gritty. Your lover,

the cook, will rest his hand on the table and glare at  

you long after you eat the spinach  

and your words. Sometimes an oak limb suddenly  

will break, crushing a car or jogger one dry  

summer’s day. Once, a limb crashed through  

a bedroom window, killing a mother and  toddler,  

who’d run to her bed  

frightened by the storm. Once a limb  

crushed a jogger, who lived to become a  

paraplegic  

governor. Sometimes a green hummingbird will hover  

inches away when you are quietly reading  in the  

garden. And you will imagine it’s your recently dead  

mother greeting you, showing off,  

checking in. Just like she’s the mourning dove  

perched on the eave, cooing  

at daybreak. You see her everywhere  

saying, take joy in being alive, love the grit.  

Somewhere a dog is barking. A small dog with  

the kind of bark that hurts your ears. Two  

hummingbirds settle in a high vitex  branch, then  

fly off, looking for nectar, cheeping  in short,  

high-pitched chirps that sound like toy  ratchets.  

As usual, doves sit on the telephone  lines. Once  

I found a hummingbird nest lying  on the  

ground. Inside were tiny eggs  

I mourned. 

Amanda Russell is an editor at The Comstock Review. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Lily Poetry Review, Pirene’s Fountain and Gulf Stream Magazine. She is the author of Barren Years (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Processing (Main Street Rag, 2024). She is a member of the Fort Worth Poetry Society and the Calling All Poets Series. She lives in the DFW Metroplex with her husband, two kids and a labrahound named Lilly. Learn more at www.poetrussell.wordpress.com.

Susan Ayres is the author of Walk Like the Bird Flies (Finishing Line, 2023) and Red Cardinal, White Snow (Main Street Rag, 2024). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems and translations from the Spanish have appeared in numerous journals. She lives in Fort Worth and teaches at Texas A&M University School of Law. Learn more at www.psusanayres.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

HOW I LEARNED TO BE A GIRL

By Emily Pérez

If the beast is unpredictable you must traverse

in postures of submission. Easier to crawl

with your face down toward the earth, nape exposed, expecting

to be struck, which may draw cold contempt, at best compassion.

Fragility may inspire a desire to protect. I learned young to dance

those careful steps around the unexploded mines

where ground was not yet gutted.

Holy, she was, the woman

who stood beside the beast, and I aimed

to be just like her, turning my arrow toward

my chest. I learned the songs that lulled, the charms

that ironed flat the prickling ruff along his neck, the hair that spiked

along his spine when agitated, and when from his sleep guttered a fitful

growl or grinding teeth, I placed, just like a night-guard, my careful wrist

inside his mouth.

HABITABLE  

By Sasha West

How in courting, we compared childhoods:

running a finger over the nubby globe,

half red with codes:

deforested, desertified, deserted.

My family wasted water:

orange marigolds in a single line. His washed

clothes & sidewalks. In school we learned

water as a system

of arteries. In the mysteries

I read: bodies bled

out. The teacher asked us

to imagine we were the woman

in a Yemen without water:

opening her door

to the neighbor’s news, gathering

clothes and goods. Goodbye house. Goodbye hill.

Being inside the sharpest pain:

trying it on again and again: my body

expanded into the world

through her door. What was

wrong leaked into me. Every year, more

tumbleweeds ready to burst against our car

with a loud crack. And his school assembly with slides.

The Before shots: a green lush happiness, pulsing—.

Only our parents could really imagine

us in a different childhood. Can I say we

didn’t know? Or did—and

didn’t care when we had

her? What the body wants is deeper

than the mind.

The world expanded

into my body. My body wanted more room

to fit the pain in.

A globe. A belly.

If I look backwards, I can still !nd no map

for this—

world as it spins out. Human need

to tamp the worry down into the body. Now

when I imagine

the sharpest pain: you

are older. You open your door.

Emily Pérez is the author of What Flies Want, winner of the Iowa Prize and a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. She co-edited The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood, also a finalist for a Colorado Book Award. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Critic, she has received grants and scholarships from Hedgebrook, the Community of Writers, Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, and Summer Literary Seminars. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her poems and criticism have appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, Fairy Tale Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Diode, RHINO, The Guardian, LARB, The Georgia Review, and DIAGRAM. She is a high school teacher in Denver where she lives with her family. Learn more at emilyperez.org.

Sasha West is the author of How to Abandon Ship and Failure and I Bury the Body, winner of the National Poetry Series, a Texas Institute of Letters award, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship. Recent poems and interviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ecotone, Tupelo Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. As part of eco-arts collaborative Hammonds + West, her multi-media shows with visual artist Hollis Hammonds have been exhibited at the Columbus College of Art and Design, Texas A&M, ArtPrize Michigan, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University, where she runs the Environmental Humanities program. Learn more at sashawest.net.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Malachi Black is the author of Indirect Light, just published by Four Way Books, and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the PSA’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). Black’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry (Yale UP, 2013), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016), and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence, 2023). A 2024-25 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Lithuania, Black has also been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black’s poems have several times been set to music and have been featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad, including recent and forthcoming translations into French, Dutch, Croatian, Slovenian, and Lithuanian. Black teaches at the University of San Diego and lives in California. Learn more at www.malachiblack.com.

George David Clark was born in Savannah and raised in Chattanooga and Little Rock. He now lives in McMurray, PA with his wife, Elisabeth, and their four children. The author of Reveille (winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, Arkansas) and Newly Not Eternal (LSU), David’s recent poems can be found or are forthcoming in AGNI, The Believer, Crazyhorse, Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Image, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. After earning an MFA at the University of Virginia and a PhD at Texas Tech University, David held the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Poetry at Colgate University and, later, the Lilly Postdoctoral Fellowship at Valparaiso University.  He’s received additional honors from Southern Poetry Review (the Guy Owen Prize), Narrative Magazine (the 30 Below Prize), and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (a Walter E. Dakin fellowship), among others. The editor-in-chief of 32 Poems, he previously served in various capacities on the staffs of Meridian, Iron Horse Literary Magazine, and the Best New Poets anthology. Since 2015 David has taught creative writing and literature at Washington & Jefferson College, where he is now an associate professor. Learn more at www.georgedavidclark.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

INNOCENCE ABROAD  

By Holly Iglesias

Travel in Europe forced me to write smaller than ever, smaller than my long surname forced into small boxes on job applications. Seated in a second - class car, window ajar, ashtrays full, I jotted down snippets of conversation and learned to tuck the notebook in my pocket and look straight ahead when police boarded the train at Budapest or Burgos. Europe taught me to use pencil instead of pen, a four - inch stub to write aerograms, poems on index cards, sketches on receipts, each tossed into a string bag from which they sometimes escaped down a narrow street and into the gutter. Surely that’s what they meant when they said Europe was charming, but it was more haunted than charming, each meander passing a vacant lot where a cathedral once stood, a rail platform where children were loaded onto freight cars, docks where ancestors lined up to depart, praying never to return. No, it had to be pencil, soft lead, ink too permanent, ink a stain we could not bear, so young, so young.

JUNK DRAWER

By Landon Godfrey

Death is the opposite of everything. —Susan Sontag  

After I die, please let your new wife throw this detritus away. Allow these things to become holes in your heart. I promise you won’t need my desiccated rubber bands, extra buttons to the ratty cardigans I wore around when cooking gardening reading that you’ll have given to a charity shop, tags from my pied dog lost in Vermont so many summers ago, local merchants’ logo-screaming magnets I wouldn’t let you put on the refrigerator, the odd champagne cork, notes about errands I either did or didn’t do, and the rest of it, all the flotsam and jetsam from the ocean of moments we weren’t paying attention to because like everyone else we thought this world would last  forever. Let your wife change the drawer liner and lay in her own provisions for the duration, until such  time as this little kitchen-corner-tucked coffin’s opened for the next viewing.

Holly Iglesias has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Edward Albee Foundation. Her poetry collections are Souvenirs of Shrunken World, Angles of Approach, and Sleeping Things. She is working on an intergenerational memoir in prose fragments that is tentatively entitled Theories of Flight.

Landon Godfrey’s collection of poems, Inventory of Doubts, was selected by Dana Levin for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. She is also the author of Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown (Cider Press Review), chosen by David St. John for the Cider Press Review Book Award, and two limited-edition letterpress chapbooks, In the Stone (funded by a Regional Artist Project Grant) and Spaceship (Somnambulist Tango Press). Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Copper Nickel, Adroit Journal, Studium in Polish translation, Best New Poets, Verse Daily, and other places. She has received fellowships from the NEA, North Carolina Arts Council, and Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences. Learn more at landongodfrey.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com 

Poem for My Daughter on the Day They Announced the End of the World  

By Andrea Deeken

The radio said there had been a mistake.

The oceans, in fact, are sixty

percent warmer than we thought.

I am cutting broccoli

to put in a pot to boil.

Quickly, because I have to leave

to pick you up from school to take

you to the dentist where they will examine

your tiny teeth, smooth white chiclets,

small as my pinky nail and later

there won’t be time.

There is never enough time—

the laundry remains unfolded days

after it comes out of the dryer.

Weeds grow through the bark chips,

dandelion seeds you wildly blow—

no matter how I try,

I can never get to the root.

You can count to sixty

in two languages.

This morning at breakfast,

Dieciséis, diecisiete, dieciocho.

Mama, are you listening?

Now the pot nearly boils over, catching

the thin skin of my wrist.

Bloom of pain petal, sink pollen,

the crust of the oatmeal bowl.

It seems the earth is more sensitive

to climate than we realized.

I know it’s time to go.

Five minutes ’til the last

bell. You’ll be left too long,

and I can’t bear the thought

of you waiting.

Ferning  

By Darla Himeles

Two white wooly worms stretch and pinch

the length of the deck. Pretend wings happen;

pretend there are no mothballs left. Pretend

the doe hunter did not scout last night in fatigues

on the abandoned property to the west.

Yesterday, four goldfinches, two dull, two light,  

pecked at drying-out golden rod ten happy minutes.

For forty-one days, do not eat from the cow's teat,  

or the goat's or the sheep's; let lie the hen's

unfertilized dreams; leave the bubbled eggs of fish,

turn from pork bone marrow and all slaughtered flesh.

Here in the four o'clock sun, lift her up. I breath into

my uterus, internal cavern of inter-clasped palms

poised for whistling (if only it were that easy): puckered lips,  

airflow, song. Lift up dull birds and their mates,  

does, moths -- all who breathe, let's. For eighty-two days,

eat of succulent coconuts, acorn squash, Ida reds.

The harvest moon lights the knife that peels and cores  

for applesauce, red, Granma Ida, like your hair

I never touched, the pink of palms in sunlight,  

the uterus if she were cut, the doe shot, the deck's rust.  

Lift her up is my song, expanding in moonlight,  

the unfurling of one million fiddlehead fern fronds. 

Andrea Deeken (she/they) is the author of the chapbook, Mother Kingdom, winner of the 2021 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition and 2022 International Book Awards finalist. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of journals including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Beyond Queer Words, The Blue Mountain Review, erbacce Journal UK, Ran Off With the Star Bassoon, and Spoon River Poetry Review, among others. A former book editor, she has worked for Multnomah County Library for nearly two decades. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. Read more at andreadeeken.com.

Darla Himeles (they/she) is a Philadelphia-based poet and an assistant teaching professor at Widener University. They are the author of the chapbook Flesh Enough and the full-length poetry collection Cleave, both published by Get Fresh Books. Her poems and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and can be read in recent and forthcoming issues of  Beloit Poetry Journal, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Night Heron Barks, Honey Literary, and American Poetry Review. They hold an AB in English from Bryn Mawr College, an MFA in poetry and poetry in translation from Drew University, and a PhD in American literature from Temple University. Find Darla on Instagram @darlahimelespoetry, and read more at darlahimelespoetry.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com