As if in Florence

from The Decameron by Boccaccio, p. 50

Day was seated and ready,
to seek attention,
to protect herself with virtue most beautiful,
her reason sending some to wonder.

I recently participated in a collaborative art project by Unprecedented. In their own words, ‘Unprecedented is a public poetry project that circulates pages of The Decameron between small groups of people, one year after the COVID-19 crisis was first declared. We reflect on the solitude, urgency, travesty, and strange beauty that is now nearing becoming a thing of the past.
Each person receives a page in the mail and blacks out part of Boccaccio’s text. What’s left on the page reveals a poem.’

If you’d like to browse the returned pages or sign up to join the project, just head on over to the Unprecedented website.

Decorated with ideographs

Decorated with ideographs they flooded the ground scarlet, a matchbox house allowed to vanish.

This post is part of my book-long erasure poetry and collage project on Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

Bones come at sundown

White or gray, thin as needles or like the timbers of a shipwreck, bones come at sundown.

This post is part of my book-long erasure poetry and collage project on Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

It rises; it dies

It rises, it doesn’t rise, it dies; a wilderness of growth entwined in battle or in love.

This post is part of my book-long erasure poetry and collage project on Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

Whitened beauty

Here terrible stumps of whitened beauty splintered and cracked, until she lay down and looked up through the network of gray lichen and branches and slept a while.

This post is part of my book-long erasure poetry and collage project on Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

Balance

It tried to grow directly into the teeth of every storm, crouched and twisted, the balance between survival and extinction so delicate.

This post is part of my book-long erasure poetry and collage project on Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.