At the beginning of 2022, I decided to start a project that integrated my love for poetry with my ink drawing practice. Each drawing is accompanied by the lines of poetry that inspired it and a link to the poem’s source.
from “fieldnotes on Hypothetical Moons” by Caroline Harper New
“Millions
of monarchs crossed our beaches
each October. Our fingertips
shone orange from grasping.”
from “daughter” by Brynn Saito
“Forgiveness is a tower of hands.”
“One day you will find yourself resisting your own waking.
Try tending to the sacred
and see where that gets you.
Try rolling through your life like a rusted train through a stockyard nation.”
From “At the Teahouse” by Kiki Petrosino
“I boiled up from bed
in my enormous nightdress, with my lungs full of burning
chrysanthemums.”
“Tonight, my love, we are free
of men, of gods, and I am a river
against you, drawn to current and eddy,
ready to make, to be unmade.”
from “Bedtime Story for the Bruised-Hearted” by Donika Kelly
from “Litany (Paulownia)” by Kasey Jueds
“Given all springs nested inside this one, like not-yet flowers nested inside a branch.”
from “On the Forces of Improvisation Under the Gun Law” by Maya C. Popa
“He’s one of those men who depend
on my politeness, says to visualize which end
of the barrel you’d like to be on.
He owns a gun farm in Florida—
they grow in swamps like water chestnuts.”
from “When We Make Lifelines, the Universe Breathes a Little Easier” by Kelli Russell Agodon
“When night becomes heavy, I break a hole
in the bag of the universe and climb out.”
from “Portrait with Lorca” by Susan Rich
“Beneath her shirt pages turn,
climbing her shoulders. Images
rearrange her breasts, then the thin line
of clavicle highlighting her underwire
x: two satin cups, black straps.”
from “A Brief History of the War” by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
“Like the other girls, I made myself pretty for the war. I painted snakes and birds on my hands in the style of the war, I cut a black line across my eyes and called that warpaint. I walked the dog on the war’s red whip.”
from “catalog of failed women whom I’ve loved or been or prayed for” by Indrani Sengupta
“she who ministered the hawk to the hornbill, against the hornbill’s will.
who is crowns of forsythia wearing a Land’s End overcoat.”
from “Doha Melt-Down Elegy” by Alice Fulton
“As prayer flags give their prayers to wind,
let my constancy compound. As fire metastasizes.
Sew me into my dark
and if a spark falls on my collar, cover it
with a needlework of charnel flowers.”
from “Lone Elk” by Stephanie Pippin
“Ungutted, minus the blood loss,
the weight
of the dead is the same
as the weight of the living.”
Danielle Weeks 