JULY WESTHALE is an accomplished literary arts archivist and revered digital media publicist Creative Writing Curator and Co-Founding Editor of a distinguished Magazine, pulp_pit.WESTHALE is a globally featured poet, essayist and literary arts activist with a host of her writings published on several digital and print spaces home and abroad. Her poetry is deep and her verses are rimmed with lyrical dexterity and her mastery of the language in both form and content is beyond any measure. MAESTRO........... TIME OF THE POET REPUBLIC is grateful and humbled to feature JULY WESTHALE, a gifted poet and a literary maestro of immeasurable caliber. The poems featured here are in her forthcoming book, "Via Negativa" - Aluta Continua- (blurb by Mbizo CHIRASHA).
CALIFORNIA BURNING
Tubbs Fire, 2017
And now the horses are as omnipresent
as the news.
Fleeing thickets, an invisible hand
parting red smoke for them. We are in
wine country. Ranchers keep extravagant breeds:
vineyard palominos, dappled darlings on purple-tongued hills.
Headlines click like loafers down linoleum: Containment 0%!
And the starving ground eating it up, eating it up. Saving
nothing for later. I start taking
notes: containment something in a container fire Tupperware.
—
We were just
in the Smokies, late
fog necking with foothills.
I could have. I could have broken
into blossom, turning the curve to a bright
many-stemmed bouquet of wild horses, thunder
thighs thudding before a slinky, silky sky.
Running because it felt good.
Blowing in the wind as if their roots were still attached.
AMERICAN LITERATURE
for Joey
“the silver lamp,--the ravishment, --the wonder--the darkness,--loneliness, the fearful thunder” John Keats
There’s a billboard with the route 66’s version of June Cleaver, holding a pie underneath block letters HO-MADE PIES, which is how dry towns get their jollies, I guess.
We buy coffee in cups so thin the joe becomes us and we never regain our human shapes, and I say to you I wonder where they keep the half-bull man and you shotgun back I’ve spent my life asking that like the sharp shooter you are.
Who wouldn’t want to be the son of a bull and a damned woman
we are all sons of bull and damn
you’ve gone West to find everything or me
and look at girls the way I look at girls who are bad for me. Like a desert
through slatternly windows. This is America: the big-pricked statues statuary in their old-growth knowing:
in the end--spoiler alert--we’re both after the wrong bandit, the bank gets robbed, the two women who should be lovers but aren’t arc their Caddie like a rainbow into the lavish vaginal canyon at the last moment, the whale gets away, Faulkner’s pretend mother doesn’t get the burial she deserves, we have to choose between Liz Taylor in a kerchief or James Dean with his shirt stuttered open, and we can’t---
THE SECRET MIRACLE
The night before I was executed
by firing squad, I had a sex dream--
a baptismal chimera just like a romp
in the hay. It was stupendous,
and when I woke soused in self,
I didn’t even mind the cold shoulder
of Winchesters designed for my heart.
The barrel lumens like brainless eyes,
gazing upon me with ardor,
and how like love it was, to beam
back at them, divining which suitor held the blank.
JULY WESTHALE is an essayist, translator, and the award-winning author of five collections of poetry, including Trailer Trash,Occasionally Accurate Science, The Cavalcade, Quantifiable Data, and Via Negativa. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. When she’s not teaching, she works as a co-founding editor of PULP Magazine.www.julywesthale.com
PorCuPineQuill is authored and edited by Mbizo CHIRASHA
Mbizo CHIRASHA the Founder and Author of the Time of the Poet.Freedom of Speech Fellow toPEN- Zentrum Deutschland,Germany.Alumni of the International Human Rights Arts Festival in New-York, USA.Literary Arts Activism Diplomatie. Globaly Certified Arts Mediums Curator and Influencer. Internationally Published Page and Spoken Word Poet. Writer in Residence. Arts for Human Rights Catalyst. Core Team Member of the Bezine Arts and Humanities Project. His illustrious poetry , hybrid writings , political commentary ,short fiction , book reviews and Arts Features are published in more than 400 spaces notably the Monk Arts and Soul in Magazine in United Kingdom. Atunis Poetry.com in Belgium. Demer press poetry series in Netherlands. World Poetry Almanac in Mongolia.Poesia journal inSlovenia. Bezine Arts and Humanities Webzine in USA. The Poet a Day in Brooklyn ,USA. Litnet Writers Journal in South Africa. African Crayons in Nigeria. Poetry Bulawayo in Zimbabwe. Pulp-pit USA.the FictionalCafe international Journal, Texas USA
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