Ars Poetica/Russell Jaffe/Sept. 14

It's day 1 of Frontiers of Poetry 2010, and here's the Ars Poetica I wrote in class:

A Toast

Raise like you would your mortal young.
In remembrance, splash stars like milk
across your chest and we'll lay down like
young beach nights and write poems about
Iowa.

There's no coast there--just the blue edges
of the map being what could be or have been,
the clouds being the earth's eyelids all the way
to your sunscreen, to the magnetic beach of
yourself,

to low tide, to whomever said that light is good
and cancels darkness' bads--they never saw
a comet tail and became a grain of sand.
So I have nothing to say, but
not for lack of gravity.






Also, here's some poems I've had published in Weird Deer and Action Yes.