Poetry Super Highway

Poetry Super Highway

February 8-14, 2016: Steven Kunert and Sonnet Mondal

Steven Kunert and Sonnet Mondal

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Steven Kunert
skunert@oregonstate.edu

Bio (auto)

Steven Kunert, of Corvallis, OR, who has been writing and publishing his poetry and prose since Nixon was in the White House, previously published in Poetry Super Highway in 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

The following work is Copyright © 2015, and owned by Steven Kunert and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Looking Across the Border from El Paso

Towering dark grey cauliflower clouds
in the peel of an orange sky
conjure thunder, lightning, downpours.

Across the Rio Grande in Juarez,
lingering gold rays paste old cars and tired people
walking home onto dusty late afternoon roads.

In one small house, painted bright yellow
with turquoise trim, lies a young man dead,
beheaded, the local news said.

A cartel’s baptism, his blood now embalmed
in kitchen dirt, final gleams fade on the wanting desert,
the sun’s wishing it had a way to mourn.

 

 


Sonnet Mondal
sonnetmondal@gmail.com

Bio (auto)

Sonnet Mondal lives in Kolkata, India and is the founder of The Enchanting Verses Literary Review. He has authored eight books of poetry and has performed on invitation at Struga Poetry Evenings, Macedonia in 2014 and Uskudar International Poetry Festival, Istanbul in 2015. Sonnet is currently one of the featured writers at International Writing Program at The University of IOWA-Silk Routes Project funded by Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. Sonnet was featured as one of the Famous Five of Bengali Youths in India Today magazine in 2010 and was long listed in The Forbes Magazine’s top 100 Celebrities 2014 edition among India’s most celebrated authors. Later in March 2015 The CultureTrip website, London listed him among the Top Five Literary Entrepreneurs of Indian English Poetry. He has been invited at the XII International Poetry Festival of Granada in February 2016. His works have appeared in the Mcneese Review, Common Ground Review, Sheepshead Review, Two Thirds North, Penguin Review, Burning Word literary Journal, The Adroit Journal, California State Poetry Quarterly,Connotation Press and Nth Position etc. (Website www.sonnetmondal.com)

The following work is Copyright © 2015, and owned by Sonnet Mondal and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

April and my Plastic Sunflowers

The four plastic sunflowers in my bedroom-
The way they swayed in the ceiling fan’s air
Were the functional-year-long-April for me.

Fallen twigs of meditating winter
And the deadwood sanity of their roughness;
The begging deserts of the patient summer
And the coarseness of their ravaged mirages;
The thin tune of the nostalgic autumn
And the restlessness of their alcoholic breezes-
Were never like fresh seasonal fruits to me
For I had the functional-year-long-April in my bedroom:
Those four plastic sunflowers.

Not long, my wedding and divorce-
Both in their infancy
Ended the perpetual April in my room
By demanding those yellow sunflowers
In the package of reparation.

It was four seasons ago and the spring of April
Now seems to be a creepy plastic serpent
Irresistibly insidious in its illusory cruelty
as my new girl friend from the same city
Talked of bringing new plastic flowers in my room.

 

 

 

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