Raphael Helena Kosek

Bio: Raphael Kosek’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in Poetry East, Catamaran, and many other journals. AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY was a finalist at Brick Road Poetry Press and released in 2019. ROUGH GRACE, her last chapbook, won the 2014 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Prize. Her poems and nonfiction have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and selected for the Writer’s Almanac. Writing ekphrastic poems about Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings has garnered her commissions to write poems to accompany O’Keeffe’s work in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Gallery at Vassar College. She teaches English at Dutchess Community College and served as the 2019-2020 Dutchess County, NY Poet Laureate. www.raphaelkosek.com

Tan, Orange, Yellow, Lavender, 1959

Georgia O’Keeffe
Tan torso of a tree exultsand the sky beyond glows
with much soft fire, for that is what lavender does to orange
and yellow; it softens the warmthinto dream, less heat, more ether.
No one has told me this is tree, or that, sky,
but I recognize shape,tender curve of trunk,
slender branching arms,the play of light in the sky
where in fugue, tan, orange,yellow, and lavender state
and restate their heady themein a hundred variations shifting
like smoke after fire, like breath,like someone’s idea of heaven.

How to Enter a Russian Novel

Do you feel the floor under your feet? Can you find your waythrough a snarl of streets? After three shots of vodkadoes the color of the sky matter?
The cabbie in some damp and smoky city will get you where you want to go, your collar turned up against the mind’s brutality, while the rain and uncertainty make definitive color difficult. Blurry. Did you really think it would be otherwise? — like the grand old novelswhere life was brilliant and sparkling while the rain fell, or the snow, or someone squealed or swore, or loversleft or entered the room with misery and Masha, newly arrived, was unbuttoning her coat,her fingers fluttering like doves.
They wore coats with many buttons on colors dark as cassisthat no one would remember and their bootfalls echodown grey winter streets and there is always a gunshot in the orchard, thenbirds taking flight while she watches from a windowtrying to decide if there are any good men in this world.

Subscribe

Copyright © 2020-2023 Trio House Press, Inc.