POEM OF THE WEEK: LYNNE THOMPSON

 

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Banjo as a dark girl,

undiminished beryl.
Many flood-plains.
Life-flame—elegant
turn—consideration
of a still kind. Color

up on her haunches.
A hubbub remembering
when blood cannot, love
being more than the only
miniature. Each nightfall

chooses, and is injured.
Caribe women know this.
Sun up until moon-crest,
they kneel but their tongues
are ever-feral and unchecked.

 

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Lynne Thompson is the author of Start with A Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2015) and Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007) winner the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. Her latest manuscript, Fretwork, won the 2018 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and was published in 2019.  Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, New England Review, and Barrow Street.