SAMANTHA TERRELL - POET / EIC, SHINE Poetry Series
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JENDI REITER

1/27/2023

 
Welcome! This week's featured poet is the Editor of Winning Writers, who also happens to BE a winning writer...Jendi Reiter! Jendi has several books on the market and has earned multiple awards, including two from the prestigious, Poetry Society of America. Thank you, Jendi, for sharing "Ovotestes" (with special thanks and first publish credits to Mom Egg Review) and "Corpse Flower Studbook," both of which can be found in Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022).

Ovotestes

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Corpse Flower Studbook

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Jendi Reiter is the author of the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), the short story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press, 2018), and five books of poetry, most recently Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022) and Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree, 2015). Their awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Poetry, the New Letters Prize for Fiction, the Wag's Revue Poetry Prize, the Bayou Magazine Editor's Prize in Fiction, and two awards from Poetry Society of America. Two Natures won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction and was a finalist for the Book Excellence Awards and Lascaux Prize for Fiction. They are the editor of WinningWriters.com, an online resource site which provides contests and markets for creative writers.


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    SHINE - International Poetry Series

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    Click here for submissions and more
    From the international poetry community, we have a "luxury of stars," as Sylvia Plath might say, and it is SHINE's honor to provide a home for their words with the online Spotlight series as well as SHINE Quarterly. Click on the logo above to learn more. And...keep writing, keep shining!
    In poetry,
    Samantha Terrell, EIC
    SYLVIA PLATH
    Stars Over the Dordogne

    Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy
    Picket of trees whose silhouette is darker
    Than the dark of the sky because it is quite starless.
    The woods are a well. The stars drop silently.
    They seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible.
    Nor do they send up fires where they fall
    Or any signal of distress or anxiousness.
    They are eaten immediately by the pines.

    Where I am at home, only the sparsest stars
    Arrive at twilight, and then after some effort.
    And they are wan, dulled by much travelling.
    The smaller and more timid never arrive at all
    But stay, sitting far out, in their own dust.
    They are orphans. I cannot see them. They are lost.
    But tonight they have discovered this river with no trouble,
    They are scrubbed and self-assured as the great planets.

    The Big Dipper is my only familiar.
    I miss Orion and Cassiopeia's Chair. Maybe they are
    Hanging shyly under the studded horizon
    Like a child's too-simple mathematical problem.
    Infinite number seems to be the issue up there.
    Or else they are present, and their disguise so bright
    I am overlooking them by looking too hard.
    Perhaps it is the season that is not right.

    And what if the sky here is no different,
    And it is my eyes that have been sharpening themselves?
    Such a luxury of stars would embarrass me.
    The few I am used to are plain and durable;
    I think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth
    Or much company, or the mildness of the south.
    They are too puritan and solitary for that--
    When one of them falls it leaves a space,

    A sense of absence in its old shining place.
    And where I lie now, back to my own dark star,
    I see those constellations in my head,
    Unwarmed by the sweet air of this peach orchard.
    There is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well.
    On this hill, with its view of lit castles, each swung bell
    Is accounting for its cow. I shut my eyes
    And drink the small night chill like news of home.

    ~~~

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  • ABOUT
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  • SHINE Poetry Series