Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    On the Line: Poems
    On the Line: Poems
    On the Line: Poems
    Ebook167 pages55 minutes

    On the Line: Poems

    By Kamala Platt

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    With gentle yet sardonic wit, this collection of poetry considers the transcultural experience and encourages engaging with the world, both intellectually and emotionally, despite feelings of isolation. Fusing personal, sociopolitical, and ecological concerns, this compilation exposes public as well as private wounds in an accessible and thought-provoking manner. Addressing human rights and gender issues, these significant poems evaluate current predicaments and express hope for a future without them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWings Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2010
    ISBN9781609400125
    On the Line: Poems

    Related to On the Line

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. An

      5 min read

    • Article

      Tessa Castro

      Jul 26, 2023

      IN COMPETITION No 295 you were invited to write a poem called Roots. Cherry MacGregor started off in medias res: ‘Has the vine died? My husband had asked,/ As we enjoyed lunch in the garden.’ Another excellent opening came from DM Davis: ‘Roots, oh m

      2 min read

    • Article

      Too Wild to Love

      Dec 1, 2022

      Too Wild to Love
      11 min read

    • Article

      Until The Sea Closed Over Us And The Light Was Gone

      Jul 1, 2020

      —Dante, Canto XXVI But if the truth is dreamed of toward the morning—El Paso Although it was really last summer’s song,all this summer Despacito played on as slower then I turned myself to gazeupon Juarez. The summer everything hurts my eyes, a dozen

      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      The painting is of a door, its wood so warpedwith moisture it cannot close. It stays ajar leaving a sliver of light—enough to suggestsomething sweet and almost unreachable behind the door—and you sit in yourroom working on the bills or those comforti

      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2018

      Our house in the 100-year flood plainflooded. They say thatfor another 800 years a hurricanelike this will not come. My internetis down and my smart phone hurts my thumbsarthritic. I’m running out of data.All my books are in boxes. Please referto my

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2019

      “My arm is so brown and so beautiful,” is a thought I haveas I’m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep.I look at it a moment in the soft glow, and see it, briefly,as though it belonged to someone else. A reddishkind of brown, like a toasted almo

      7 min read

    • Article

      Low Expectations

      Feb 1, 2019

      Low Expectations
      7 min read

    • Article

      Any Given Day

      Mar 29, 2021

      Any Given Day
      11 min read

    • Article

      An Open Palm

      Apr 14, 2022

      An Open Palm
      10 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 1, 2022

      Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. —Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” tr. by Clare C

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2021

      If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. —Rudyard Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War,” The Years Between, 1919 She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have somethi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • Article

      Tracie Morris

      Mar 9, 2021

      1. There’s a sign near the waterfrontI think it’s advertising cheer:says 400 YEARS, VIRGINIA SPIRITS. A swig. A year ago last night, my dead crowd mean even ceremonyof Jamestown, at the schooner that brought those first here.They think: long tripdid

      2 min read

    • Article

      Too Wild To Love

      Nov 24, 2022

      Too Wild To Love
      11 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Jun 4, 2018

      I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. —Fred Allen I have always wondered, in reading travels, at the childish joy travellers felt at meeting people they knew, and their sense of loneliness when they did not, in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 3, 2019

      And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons. —Ogden Nash, “Everybody Tells Me Everything,” The Face Is Familiar, 1941 Someone goes by wearing a

      3 min read

    • Article

      Paul,

      Jul 1, 2020

      Houston, April 2019 The coarse and leafy stalks, like memory,Began to soften in my hands. The kaleMassaged with olive oil and salt. Silently, You sat on the couch as if in grisaille,Scrolling through the twitter of the state.A fragile, bluesy cover s

      14 min read

    • Article

      In The Ruins Of Paradise

      Dec 17, 2018

      In The Ruins Of Paradise
      18 min read

    • Article

      Sensory Fieldwork

      Sep 19, 2019

      Sensory Fieldwork
      6 min read

    • Article

      As the World Collapses

      Jul 27, 2017

      As the World Collapses
      7 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2021

      I learned the world through the bottoms of my feet, barein the creeks of summer, stepping on pebbles, the squidgeof moss between my toes. On hot asphalt, the hop and skipover cracks, feet already toughened by bramble, dirt, the pricklyground of pine

      4 min read

    • Article

      ’Tis The Silly Season

      Aug 16, 2023

      ’Tis The Silly Season
      3 min read

    • Article

      Spell

      Apr 25, 2018

      Spell
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for On the Line

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      On the Line - Kamala Platt

      Author

      Power Lines (In Wind)

      Wind is Spirit

      Put yourself where it blows.

      I suppose I’ll believe you both for what it’s worth is not an easy ride

      for D.C.W. at 100

      I.

      Upon hearing you say

      I will be your friend forever.

      You are 19,

      and have not known what it is

      to befriend forever—

      holding until your muscles lose feeling

      and there is nothing but a fierce madness

      holding you,

      and then to feel yourself go,

      knowing that

      s/he can never be friend to you again,

      seeing that

      love was only inside you,

      and catching that drift

      away from you

      took your greatest friend.

      Will I trust your pledge?

      Or slander your clemency

      waiting for youth to learn?

      II.

      When biking, my neighbor said

      "You always think the wind

      is against you until

      you turn around."

      After seventy-five years,

      the old man is stronger

      than the wind on most days.

      Kansas Borderlands

      The first immigrants to the land of the south wind

      nourish her soils with their bones,

      nourish the winds with their souls,

      give the world bread,

      feed all children alongside their own.

      Before the first scripted words were pilfered from desert and jungle

         to be sequestered in European churches,

      before fire was the weapon against those words

      before Mexico fingered the edges of Indian Territory,

      before Guadalupe Hidalgo hounded México south of El Río Bravo,

      before the cattle trails north through the old borderlands,

      before the first treaties made by the First Peoples of the Plains,

      before the first treaties were broken,

      before peoples were forced south from the prairies of their ancestors

         in the wake of the Santa Fe’s boom,

      before the people came north to lay the tracks for the trains,

      before the Kanza lived in homes of hide, brush or sod,

         settled on the Blue River banks,

      before they were presented with homes of stone

         that hung heavy on the spirit,

      before red wheat replaced multicolored corn,

      before the encroaching country dishonored its predecessors

         with betrayal, broken treaties, blood,

      before the underground railroad passed through

         and Kansas won its place as a land of emancipation,

      before the US detained the immigrant progeny of America’s ancestors,

         before all this …

      the first immigrants to the land of the south wind

         nourished its soils with their bones,

         nourished its winds with their souls,

         nourished the skies with the colors of their spirits.

      My Own Private Borderlands

      After Gloria Anzaldúa

      Born on the cusp   where Mennonite meets Welt,

      an embattled terrain—   despite claims to peace—

      where to one side, people   are "in the world

      but, not of it" and to the other. …   My foremost claim to

      the faith, of late, clutches   the hereditary nature of ethnicity—

      definitely that puts me   on the border—

      less than one quarter ethnic,   martyred Mennoblood,

      blood that never   directly spilt another’s blood,

      but perhaps a woman’s.   (But die Frauen bleed anyhow con la luna.)

      Sangre Pura Menonita—     Nicht meine.

      Here I know the borderlands     is no escape route. To escape

      such culture, one must fly out,   as moneyed exile or tourist.

      Rather, leben en la frontera   is a state of permanent flux

      that ties one with   and simultaneously breaks one from

      a constant reshaping of something   we call cultura.

      Hibiscus and Marigolds

      The green is denser than jungle this year

      under the old cottonwoods in late June.

      I know this because

      half my life back

      and half the world away

      my brother and I walked through

      ferns and bamboo,

      followed monkeys

      who galloped from tree to tree

      never touching earth.

      We climbed the rocks

      barefoot above Deogarh Falls

      where black igneous

      under shining water

      is streaked with silver,

      late in the afternoons.

      There, men in orange dhotis

      lay alters

      with hibiscus and marigolds

      and sacrifice kid goats

      with one swoop of an ax.

      Afterward, I couldn’t look

      at the red of the hibiscus.

      Much later I couldn’t sit still

      in white limestone churches

      with varnished oak pews

      and listen to men preach,

      men stuffed into bulging white shirts,

      swaddled in a suit, wrapped with a tie

      as if something might escape

      to move us from our pews

      to move us to the green of the jungle

      and the red of the kid goat’s blood.

      Though He’d Rather Work For National Geographic

      As we drove back to town

      she told me

      that her husband makes maps for the Air Force—

      that is all she knows about his work

      because it is classified;

      the job makes them a living,

      though he’d rather work for National Geographic

      or teach geography.

      I didn’t tell her

      your classified secrets,

      composed, calm inside you,

      won’t destroy any woman’s farmyard;

      that though we never have quite enough to last the month,

      we draw maps that will one day open dreams

      into

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1