Better Than Starbucks Poetry Magazine November 2018

Regular Features Pages

African Poetry with Michael R. Burch

Sentimental Poetry with Anthony Watkins

Prose and Form Poetry with Anthony Watkins

Better Than Fiction! (creative non-fiction)

Featured Poems

Publisher’s Choice:

Formal Poetry

Even As We Seize the Day

A broken clock is

a photo of the moment

its hands stopped moving.

We light our cob pipes

on the recliners, our lips

shriveled like mummies.

Behind steady smoke,

faces look like clock faces.

We try not to breathe.

But the smoke dissolves.

Somewhere, a parking meter

dings. Anubis stirs.

Ravens flap their wings

awkwardly to float in place,

but the wind just laughs.

An afternoon chill

pierces our fleece-lined loafers.

We die a little.

Anton Yakovlev’s latest poetry collection is Ordinary Impalers (Kelsay Books, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Hopkins Review, Amarillo Bay, Prelude, Measure, and elsewhere.

Editor’ s Choice:

Free Verse Poetry

Hollow Rings

The sky bruises slowly

Blues slipping into violets, slashes of red

purpling on to a stain of pink

Before the sun,

at first a pretty little light trick

involving a folded penny

then a thumbnail

chewed off to drift on,

slinks off

finally just another rain dog’s hidden tail scamper

leaving me, the flea, squinting & lost,

in its ritual dusk bleed.

No. I don’t pay ‘em any mind

(when they say “it’s always darkest right before the dawn”)

Let me be

the darksome judge

the stygian evaluator

These eyes, despite the red rims,

kaleidoscopic spiderwebs of busted veins

& hollow rings,

can still see,

even

through the tears.

A.S. Coomer is a writer and musician. His novels include Rush’s Deal, The Fetishists, Shining the Light, and The Devil’s Gospel. He runs Lost, Long Gone, Forgotten Records, a “record label” for poetry. He coedits Cocklebur Press. He likes tacos. A lot.

Editor’s Choice:

International Poetry

Freedom

Against a dark-hued

Threatening sky’s

Shrieking winds

Flies a stormy petrel,

Flapping her tiny wings

Dominated by the elements

Yet,

Soaring

Over the

Sea,

A striking

Kinetic image

Of pure

Aerial

Freedom.

Sunil Sharma is a Mumbai-based senior academic, critic, literary editor, and author with nineteen published books: six collections of poetry; two of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel; eight joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism; plus one joint poetry collection.

The Interview

with Rae Armantrout

by Suzanne Robinson and Anthony Watkins

Rae Armantrout’s most recent books, Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, Itself, Partly: New and Selected Poems, Entanglements, (a chapbook selection of poems in conversation with physics), and Wobble were published by Wesleyan University Press. Wobble is a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. In 2010 her book Versed won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, Bomb, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, etc. Her books have appeared in Spanish, French, Italian, and German editions. She is recently retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. She currently lives in the Seattle area.

SR: How do you decide when to write? Do you set aside time every day or is it more spontaneous?

RA: I allow myself time almost every morning to jot in my notebook or to work on poems that are already underway, but I don’t force it if nothing comes. I will make notes during the day too, wherever I happen to be. I start writing whenever something nags at me, puzzles me. I write towards discovering what that feeling is and where it comes from.

SR: Do you outline your poems?

RA: Not at all. I feel like if I already knew where a poem was going, I wouldn’t bother to write it. I really see writing as a way of thinking in real time. Parts of poems come to me at different times in different circumstances. My process involves deciding what goes with what — but I can’t do that until I have the pieces, the “what.”

Interview Page Two

Four Poems by Rae Armantrout