New Mexico Mercury

Poetry Finds a Future: Women of the World Poetry Slam

A celebration of the female voice in the Duke City.

Mercury Poetry: Two poems from Joan Logghe

Sweet name for a new place.

I cruise your supermarket with poetry

in my heart.  I finger the Pendleton,

spend a lot of time at the Pendleton blankets,

and if time is money I own a Chief Joseph.
 

If time is money I sleep in a Best Western

with metal stallions rearing out front...

The Role of Small Presses in Fortifying Literature

San Antonio-based Wings Press and other regional small presses offer relevance and empowerment in the face of conservative backlash. 

The Lost Poets of the Russian Revolution

I have always loved poetry, its power and resonance in the human heart; and I have always had an affinity for the Russian poets, especially those of the October Revolution of 1917, how they used their words to further that revolution.

My meager study is cursory at best, a mere dip in a great sea of verse. Yet, it might whet your appetite to explore further, as Russian poetry holds a unique place in literature. As Joseph Brodsky says in his essay on Osip Mendelstam, “For those raised in the English-speaking world, it is difficult to comprehend that Russian poets have long had a political status as great as that as more public figures and that Russian poetry frequently has a political impact.”...

Mercury Poetry: The woods eat war and forget it

The metal jackets of bullets
rust in the dark river
beyond the weaving grass.

Lightning bugs rise up
in their landscape gaping
with old graves overgrown.

Tractor guts rot and ripped
up soil becomes nutritious...

Six Liberties of Compassion

A much needed poem for the season by V.B. Price.

Mercury Poetry: Between Portales and Clovis

On the road from Portales to Clovis
sand mixes with cloud,
the air thick with grainy patches where dust
joins with air in a raucous dance
ignoring the people below
ignoring the animals in their burrows
ignoring the cows eating, heads down, haunches up,
not a care in the world...

Mercury Poetry: Central and San Mateo

A       group       of
strangers      waits
for   the   bus,   all
looking  down  the
street at the same
moment           for
something      that
will    carry   them
into    the    future,
and  one  of  them
takes    his    shirt
off,   as  if  to  say:
this   is    my   city

Mercury Poetry: Without Warning

At the bus stop and out of the corner of my eye
I see myself waiting,
awkward bundle at my feet.
I am wearing the same sky blue fleece
though it hangs looser against my body.
My hair, still long and full and brown,
frames the younger me in her oblivion...

Weekly Poem: The Poet at Thirty-four—for Joseph Lease

We are we & when we are not we
the poet thinks we are a gun

in his head the poet thinks we are a rivulet in the forest
the poet thinks we are we

& when we are we we are a naked moonpearled night
& a child fishing thick shadows...