Koss Works
Writing | Poetry | Art
Pleased to have two pieces from One for Sorrow published in The Lumiere Review today. “Alternate Thanksgiving” is the first piece in the book. “Twelve Past Dead” appears in a different form (two consecutive poems) in the book. Know that each contains references to grief and/or suicide. There are other poems in the issue that do as well. Note the content warnings in headers, a great idea that I’d like to see other journals implement. The poems . . .
Pleased to have a poem released on a strange and difficult day of beginnings and endings. This piece is ritualistic and I started it in a CA Conrad workshop, then “workshopped” it in Lynn Melnick’s 92Y workshop last fall/winter. It incorporates bits of the ritual into it. Does that make it meta-ritualistic? I don’t know, but the timing of events reinforces my feelings of a strange order in the cosmos even when it is not what I would like it to be. “Still Life with Cherry Tomatoes No. 1, Singing Bowl,” a poem about endings and renewal. May the doors open somewhere . . . and life and all its struggles obtain meaning through story (Akasha) and metaphor. All of it. The beautiful, the heartbreaking, and the opaque, mysterious, and labile.
Screwing around tonight with some paint and pens, which I then digitized. These are possible inclusions in the book–Magpies of sorts with asemic writing, Wuthering Heights page, and a mysterious black package . . . I like digitizing the work and replicating, changing, introducing new variables . . . Yes, I’m still a bit of a punk.
Rogue Agent has released issue 72, which includes poetry by:
Jen Yáñez-Alaniz
Cassandra Griffing
Katie Darby Mullins
Melissa Fite Johnson
Alix Perry
INTERVIEW: Jessica Abughattas
Paula Ethans
Justin Vicari
Koss
Sara Luisa Kirk
Andrew Kozma
What a great list of contributors. My somatic poem, “Shoulder Story” is a song to my deformed shoulder. I know I’m supposed to be writing erotic landscape poems as a queer, but I prefer to bitch about things. In a universe where most thoughts have been had, I am pleased to be the only human to have called a psoas muscle, “rubber labile bitch band snapper.” On a more serious note, if Western medicine knew more about the psoas, there’d be fewer back problems and surgeries. It’s a very emotional muscle.
I don’t know how I missed this unless it got zapped in the mysterious WordPress crash of February, but my flash fiction/prose poem first published in Cincinnati Review’s Micro series was selected for the Best Small Fictions 2020 anthology. I received my copy a month ago, and it’s full of great writing including work by Kim Addonizio, Kathy Fish, Ilya Kaminsky, and many others. Pick up your copy on the Sonder Press site or on Amazon. I wrote this piece when I was about 25 in a class I took with Maxine Chernoff (a great prose poem writer). There’s a recording on the Cincinnati Review site, as well as one here on my “Listen” page. Also read Madeleine Wattenberg’s interesting article on Failure Poetics for a unique perspective on expectations and writing.
