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This week's featured poet is Nina Parmenter. Nina's emotive work immediately engages the reader and offers keen insights from start to finish. Please enjoy "Upon Reading That You Share 50% of Your Genes With Various Fruits and Vegetables" (from Nina's collection, Split, Twist, Apocalypse), and "Strings" (with first publish credits to Fevers of the Mind). Thank you, Nina, for sharing your words! Upon Reading That You Share 50% of Your Genes With Various Fruits and Vegetables Now you understand why you have always felt like a monkey’s lunch, a tangerine in primate skin, fructose and peely pith. Now you understand why you were plucked and hung high to ripen, why you grind like a coffee bean, why you sprout, why you seed. You, with your new-found insight, can shine like a half-melon moon. You can blossom like a turnip in the earth, half mauve. Because now you understand why you are so a bit of everything that you cannot fit it all in, and yet, you are always half. Strings Yes, there are strings wrapping our tight chests, our temples, our pin-striped wrists. Twisting, one-two, in a well-turned hitch. Yes, there are strings, curled in a flexing whip, our skin waiting, eager and crisp, for the coils that ping from the shadows. Yes, there are strings cracked in a lattice from lip to purpling lip. We scream. We are already swallowed. “Who’s there?” we cry, and we search for a purposeful hand well-versed in the weave and the flick, chasing strings until they are tails whilst our ankles trip trip trip.  Nina Parmenter lives in the Wiltshire countryside, where she splits her time between writing, work, and motherhood. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and web-based publications, and she has been nominated for the Forward Prize. Find Nina online at: https://ninaparmenter.com
Thanks for joining me to celebrate another talented poet...Lynne Jensen Lampe. Lynne writes from her home in Missouri, and is active on social media. Please enjoy two poems from her award-winning collection Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022) - "At the Other Hospital," and "The Tutorial" - and her poem "Jitter and Shimmer" (originally published in Isthmus Review). At the Other Hospital they pass pills in paper cups. No one will gas her with a rubber hand of god, but here surgeons not psychiatrists rule the halls, here white coats spread across the room like fat in a pan. A young one needles Mama’s vein again & again, vial after vial of blood for tests. Tubing tethers her body to machines & her mind straddles barbed wire, the memory of six million. At this moment her bones hold just one doctor’s name. Mengele. Nazi. Earlier today— forced transport. Shoes, clothes taken. Her fall, a brain bleed, helicopter ride to a city hospital. Falling—her relentless fear. When I was six on the down escalator shopping at Prange’s Mama made me stand in front in case she tumbled. Today she risks all for me. Today I know she loves me. A white coat, a mengele, taps my shoulder. My Jewish mama bolts upright, growls you. can’t. have. my. daughter. The Tutorial Plastic bouffant wig for me, Vidal Sassoon five-point cut for her. Mama tunes out Twiggy, wriggles into girdle, half slip & bra. We both watch her face in the mirror as she angles white pearl across her lips, dips a little brush in water then shadow, purples her lids with Mary Quant. Mama slips into the blue sheath, pats powder on her nose & chin, snaps the compact shut. I dig through my shoebox of Avon samples, inch-long tubes of grease & sunrise: reds, corals, magentas, pink frosts. She spritzes Topaz inside each wrist, hers & mine. I want what I can’t yet name. I want her glamour. I want her. She pops on white oval shades, grabs the keys to the Corvair. Rubs my kiss from her cheek with spit & a thumb. Jitter and Shimmer Maybe it means nothing, the pile of dead bugs on the corner of my desk. I smash another brown recluse with a wire cutter, fingernail-flick dried flies into wings and legs. Honky tonk on the stereo, second G&T half gone, you’re in the kitchen waiting. Give me ten, I say, and step into the shower. You are not young. I am not wise. We are a shock of black-eyed susans wilting. The box of love crickets you gave me lies on the floor, lid askew. A branch moves outside the window. Sunlight shafts my bedroom and they sing. The prescription on the plastic envelope reads “Use 1 gram per vagina weekly.” Lucky me! I’ll have enough for all my vaginas, I say. Some women don’t have any, you say. We drink whiskey from plastic cups. I ride along your thigh to the only music that matters: the hum inside my jeans, more power line than treble clef. I am young. You have talent and curls. Clouds clot a sky that only one of us sees. I steal anger and tomato the shed. This not-me pleasures in the spurt of pulp and seed, readies for the next slap of rain.  Lynne Jensen Lampe’s poems appear in or are forthcoming from many journals, including Stone Circle Review, THRUSH, Rise Up Review, and Yemassee. She often writes about mother-daughter relationships, mental illness, and antisemitism - themes found in her debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), a 2023 Eric Hoffer Book Award winner in poetry. She edits academic writing and lives in mid-Missouri with her husband, two dogs, and a friendly number of dust bunnies. Online at: https://lynnejensenlampe.com; Bluesky @ljensenlampe; or, IG @lynnejensenlampe.
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SHINE - International Poetry Series
From the international poetry community, we have a "luxury of stars," as Sylvia Plath might say, and it is my honor to provide a home for their words through SHINE Poetry Series.
NOW IN PRINT!
Stars Over the Dordogne
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