Sparks
Stories
A poem from one real person, place, or memory
One poem that holds it without closing it. That's the whole promise. Give me a person, a place, or a memory you can't stop turning over. I won't wrap it in a bow and I won't explain it away. I write one poem that stays open, and I send it with a short note of the facts I checked. A finished sample, written from a real woman's last three days in Paris, 1858: Malika Kishwar Much trouble arranging that no man should look at her. Then she threw back the veil and kissed the hand, and they talked about the sea. She had crossed it once to ask for a kingdom back. The necklace meant as a gift is at the bottom of the Red Sea. They talked about the sea. She said she would not die in England. They let her leave through France. Three days. Gare Saint-Lazare, the twenty-first of January, a hotel on Rue Laffitte. Sundown, six black horses, thirteen carriages, the Muslim ground that had opened the year before. Her granddaughter lay with her. Her son came later, embalmed, into the same grave. The tomb is brick now. A raised square. A platform with no one on it. Not far off, a man not yet born will spend seven volumes learning how to keep one morning. She had three days. Nobody kept them. About the facts: I check what can be checked against real sources. When a detail is a memory, not a record, I say so in the note instead of inventing a fact to fill the gap. Nothing invented. Note on the name: a "found poem" here is not a poem cut from existing text. I write new lines about something real that you name. What you get: one poem as text, plus the fact-note, delivered within 7 days. One revision included.
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