Lois Marie Harrod's latest collection Woman was published by Blue Lyra in February 2020. Her Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks; her chapbook And She Took the Heart appeared in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches at the Evergreen Forum in Princeton and at The College of New Jersey.
Links to her online work www.loismarieharrod.org
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► Lois Marie's Origami microchaps, selected poems & audio versions are available below. Download the single-page PDF by clicking the title & saving to your pc. Set your printer for 'landscape' printing, Folding instructions are under the Who We Are menu tab.
Origami Microchap |
Selected Poems | |
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Karl's Rhubard | ||
Click title to download PDF microchap Collage Rhubarb Sky by JanK * Her Face - First published in Shot Gun Journal: |
Anatole’s Hold He was holding me loosely - Karl's Rhubarb Karl was a slob - Her Face Her face had the texture
Lois Marie Harrod © 2020 |
Not Anatole Not a gnat Not Anna either - What My Mother Told Me Not much. Sometimes a tad. Mostly cautionary. She didn’t know and refused gossip. and I tried but the pen proved, as pens do, silent - Grandmother's Oppossum What was she Nice when she felt dour Her sex, the sour No, he did not want to hear her pleasure, she was to the long game, the tag end Keep your secrets to yourself, You’re luckier than most - |
Click title to download PDF microchap
Cover photo: beatnik girl
By fille de la ville •
Audio recording by Lois Marie Harrod
'From Nightmares of the Minor Poet'
was previously published in Off the Coast |
The Minor Poet If the world had been his aviary,
he would have been the lesser bird, unable to sing the high notes or the low though he knew enough of depression to spill himself into that well which is the world. And perhaps that was his purpose, he thought, a beak that might bring to the surface just enough water to sustain someone, anyone, passing by, not for eons or years, but an hour . . . less, just until she trod a little farther on and found a fresh stream, where she could sit, maybe listen. •
Lois Marie Harrod © 2014
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The Minor Poet Tries Haiku Stinkbug hibernating Manny sips his morning chai, Tattered scarecrow Cold rain falling
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Cover - ‘Mykonos” (the web)
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A Little Poem is best. No one
has time or inclination for voyages or treks. Long wars take a life or more and the shortest spat becomes a drawn-out divorce. We’ve been here and there fore and aft. So avoid story. Avoid conflict and all its sticky dead. Be slick. Be quick. A little poem is best. • Lois Marie Harrod © 2012
Acknowledgment: Hot Metal Press 2009
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Splitting the Chair Like dividing |
Breadcrumbs
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Breadcrumbs So many substitutions in this story:
stepmother for mother, brother for father, morsels of muffin for little white stones, and once the oven was hot, witch for boy, and in earlier locations, Gretel for pearl, grill for teeth, take my thumbs for chicken bones, grandma, take my babies for wolf meat. I’d give you my incisors, my mother said when I knocked out my own, carrion for crow, cave for castle, ogre for goat who suddenly regrets he didn’t eat the damn kid when he could have. In some tales a few children get back home. • Lois Marie Harrod © 2012 Acknowledgment: Lunch Ticket
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Truth sat in the Barber Chair Truth sat in the barber chair |
Penelope Decides What to Wear to Her Funeral
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Depends, she says, on when she dies:
in winter the blue silk with its Mediterranean shifts, in summer, white clouds, the blinding walls of Mykonos. Whatever the weather, she will look good, better than life, Botox can do that these days, a new body before she’s shrunken under, just in case her man returns from his wanderings to stand at her casket, to say he loved her once with the terseness of men who drift, who suddenly remember that once they promised to be faithful as the flotsam that bore them home. •
Lois Marie Harrod © 2012 Acknowledgment: Fickle Muses
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