Be My Stillness of Rush:
Response Poem Technique
Choose a submission that resonates with you and respond through poetry through focusing on one or more images in the original submission.
Untitled
Sheng Zhao
Let the wind be,
be my sound of silence,
be my stillness of rush,
winter is here,
but I desire the sunshine,
here I come,
even I once hath been,
I will not be conquered by my own nature.
Good Thinking Partners
Jack Peterson
Those languaging in this classroom
are not individuals.
We have never known Choi
without her White Sox cap.
Andrei is always eligible
for tennis in his essays.
Paul, in ritual handshakes
transmits Moldovan super colonies.
I’m sorry
Zhao Sheng
I have cut you.
When we sat together
in my office,
your essay between us,
I learned myths I still know
of DaVinci.
Your essay cut you deeply
as a spectator of a genius future self
sleeping only two hours a day
buying pigeons in the marketplace
drawing studies of flight
I knew you earlier as an application
as affluent, private, San Franciscan student,
middling grades
and years away
from your father.
Three weeks in
your coursebooks still shrink-wrapped
and arms still folded.
I was not prepared for how you laughed,
enjoyed even,
the young adult novel
we read aloud.
Each text cut you differently,
my knowing of you,
mattering of you
troubling of you
And I cut you at last
in a way legal counsel would advise,
with your unofficial transcript,
academic progress policy,
and a formal email
sent to DaVinci’s junk folder.
Stillness of Rush
Jack Peterson
There were those days without wind
when the heat weighed us down
even as it raised stalks of corn and sunflowers
But you missed those days.
School on break and no reason
to stay around just to dawdle
between the dollar store
and the Subway in the gas station.
You missed the silence of rushes
stilled by leafy summer.
I understand your leaving.
Winter stayed too long
and its wind was relentless.
To some born here
the wind may soothe
like the sea does on the coast.
I come from mountains
where wind clips peaks
and one can hide.
I still tried to run through winter
most mornings before dawn
on country roads cut as miles.
Layers on layers. Hunter’s orange cap.
Caver’s headlamp.
All alone on the icy roads.
There were times I would see cars
and hoped they would see me.
The delivery car of some local newspaper, I think,
but it never stopped at our box.
The pickup owner who would drive from door to property gate,
sometimes letting out the dog who would chase me.
The school bus driver with open garage,
letting the bus idle and warm in the driveway.
I felt foolish being out this early without a gate to check or delivery to make.
My nature is to stay inside until it’s no longer my nature.
I wanted to change, to do hard things.
The hardest thing I could do was prepare to be lonely and unrewarded.
The wind sometimes felt like it came from all directions.
A mile running north into the headwind.
Turn east for three miles of headwind.
Another mile of headwind south.
Another three miles west and I was home.
Many outbuildings had sheet metal roofing.
Many trees lost branches.
One morning as I was installing my headphones in my ears
I heard a pack of coyotes howling in a copse to the north.
I ran anyway, all the time imagining the farmer standing over my body
sucking his teeth at me
lacerated by tumbling sheet metal or
crushed by an oak limb,
or torn by the pack,
my screams lost in the wind if they came at all.
I desired sunshine
yet here I come again
with icy footing
and hunter’s cap
facing another headwind.