Poet of the Month

January: Rebecca Lowe (Wales).
February: Jim Gronvold (USA). 
March: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld (USA).
April: Tozan Alkan (Turkey).
May: Byron Beynon (Wales).
June: Michelle Chung (USA). 
July: Jim Gwyn (USA).
August: Jonathan Taylor (England).
September: Beata Poźniak (USA).
October: Maria Taylor (England).
November: Stanley H. Barkan (USA).
December: John Dotson (USA).

January: Maria Mastrioti (Greece).

February: Gayl Teller (USA).
March: Mike Jenkins (Wales).
April: Cassian Maria Spiridon (Romania).
May: Simon Fletcher (England)
June: Sultan Catto (USA)
July: Vojislav Deric (Australia)
August: K. S. Moore (Ireland)
September: Kristine Doll (USA)
October: Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan (USA)
November: Christopher Norris (Wales)
December: Maria Mazziotti Gillan (USA)

2023: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 

January: Samuel Ezra (Wales)
February: Tôpher Mills (Wales)
March: Rob Cullen (Wales)
April: Mandira Ghosh (India)
May: John Greening (England)
June: Rosy Wood-Bevan (Wales)
July: David Hughes (Wales)

2025: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 
January: Annest Gwilym (Wales)
February: Sam Smith (Wales)
March: Dave Lewis (Wales)
April: Scott Elder (France)
May: Angela Kosta (Italy)
June: Abeer Ameer (Wales)
July: Jenny Mitchell (England)
August: Sydney Lea (USA)

 

 SEPTEMBER POET OF THE MONTH: 
RICHARD COLLINS (USA)

 Richard Collins (c) 2025 Richard Collins

 

Richard Collins lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he directs Stone Nest Zen Dojo. Growing up in Southern California, he earned degrees from the University of Oregon and the University of California Irvine. A Fulbright grant sent him to England for a year to do dissertation research, resulting forty years later in a memoir about love, art, and literature in London and Europe, In Search of the Hermaphrodite (Tough Poets Press, 2024).

Dean Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at California State University Bakersfield, he has taught at universities in the U.S. and abroad. He spent a year as a Leverhulme fellow teaching American literature at the University of Swansea, and five years in Eastern Europe, first as Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Universities of Bucharest and Timişoara, and then as professor at the American University in Bulgaria. For many years he lived in New Orleans, where he edited the Xavier Review, and he still serves as abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple.

His books include John Fante: A Literary Portrait (Guernica Editions, 2000) and No Fear Zen (Hohm Press, 2015), in addition to several translations of works by Zen masters. Two volumes of poetry are forthcoming: Stone Nest and Cartoons for the Chaos: Poems: 1975-2025 (both with Shanti Arts Publishing in Maine).

Swansea

110 Terrace Road

 

That winter after the second marriage
before the second divorce

You arrived with your bag full of torts
strolling the graceful curve of white strand

About a mile to Oystermouth
in knee-length leather coat and virgin scarf

Gloved hands in your pockets, you stopped
and turned to flash your infallible smile

For a snapshot. The sun came out and suddenly
struck you as it began to snow as though

A pillow had been slit and shaken in the clouds
whitening the white sand on Mumbles Head

The trains stopped running. For three days the roads
were impassable. Even the lighthouse closed

You were unable to reach London, much less
return to Philadelphia. Taxis refused to climb

The steep slippery ice to Terrace Road, giving us
the perfect occasion to reflect, reconcile

And to forgive what we could not forget
the same roll of film contains a shot

Of the grate in our sublet house where a coal fire
(you heard “cold fire”) smoldered like a repressed

Apology. And we tried to pretend we hadn’t overstayed
our welcome in each other’s arms and heart

So much for our fond reunion in Wales
did you know even then we were a mistake?


Previously published in Fathoms 2:1 (Fall 1992).

(c) 2025 Richard Collins

November 2024

Then one day someone up and steals the furniture from your porch
you’re annoyed but you think, maybe they need it more than I do

Only to find out they have plenty of furniture of their own
and plenty of porches to put it on, many more than you

In fact they are billionaires with houses and towers galore
they just don’t want you to have what you need or to be at ease

Because it doesn’t serve their purpose; only your primal fear
of losing what little you’ve got to those with even less than you

Will cause you to come begging to them to fix it with an X
twisted crucifix, crypto swastika, built from the bones of a little blue bird

When you wake up and complain that they’ve taken your porch
they turn around and claim that it’s you who have stolen it from them

Now they are chipping away at the foundation of your house
and you think, maybe I’ll move to Canada, maybe I’ll revolt

But you know that you’ll do nothing of the sort because anger
and greed and ignorance are universal, fear is eternal

And you are outnumbered. And you love your country. And you recall
what it was like to nap like the dead on what was once your porch.


Previously published in Clockhouse 12 (2025).

(c) 2025 Richard Collins

Confessions of a Hoarder’s Brother

My little sister was a hoarder;
it’s hard to say out loud
but she never had a chance.

Born under the sign of Cancer
sensitive
she felt something terribly important
was missing
so she accumulated a mountain
of things of no importance at all.

An old story.

For a while she tried
to figure out what went wrong
what caused her to collect addictions:
drugs, makeup, fathers of her several children,
tattoos and jewelry and
clothes like costumes she never wore,
tags still attached,
therapies in and out of vogue.

While our father was still alive she rallied
with a theory, popular at the time,
and broke his heart,
making up evidence even she doubted
about what turned out to be false memory
encouraged by an expensive therapist
whose specialty was repressed
traumas of molestation.

The truth was very different
but maybe worse than that:

at two years old she was abandoned
(classic hoarder origin story)
not physically but psychically left behind.

It happened like this:

One summer day our mother got a phone call:
our older sister (my elder by twelve years
and hers by twenty-two) was in the hospital

I heard only snippets:
car crash, brain damage, vegetable ….

For the next several weeks
our mother was absent until our angelic elder sister
let go of the little parachute of life that was left
and took down with her the rest of the woman
(all but the body of her who’d given birth to us)
who disappeared into herself.

I could take it; I was twelve:
I went minimalist and threw God out the window,
along with my dead sister and broken mother
like playing cards into a hat.

But my little sister had just turned two in July,
a week or so after Independence Day,
and here we were in August,
and a mother in endless mourning
even after the finality of the funeral
was bad company,
and yet for the rest of her life
my sister never left the house for long,
even after our mother did, at last, agree to die.

After all, she needed a place to warehouse her crap.

For the next half century you can guess the rest,
she never threw anything away:
men, meth, makeup, myths.
Her closets bulged with impulse purchases
the attic could not hold all the trash
the yard was an obstacle course
the garage was pregnant with corpses
of embryonic hopes she could not let go of —
but her heart was still empty.

She collected everything
except her freedom
until
that great hoarder,
the Crab that was present at her birth,
collected her.

(c) 2025 Richard Collins

Spitting Images

But I am not a Buddhist — even that is denied me. My spirit needs matter — a medium — which resists the peaceful [...] Unlike a monk, my self or mind-self is not my medium — I cannot contemplate myself into myself.

                        – Philip Guston in a letter to Ross Feld, Sept. 1978

 

The golden profile of that boulder:
A lion facing the rising sun.

Like a rube in the Uffizi
I wander through the abstract canvases
of nature offering my glosses, my impressions,
turning raw beauties into mere familiarities;
or worse, like a critic offering mere philosophies,
reversing the course of art.

There’s Aunt Sally in that tree trunk
upside down, head buried in the ground,
her spindly legs splayed to the sky.

Or the Monkey King imprisoned
in that cliff-face for kalpas
grinning against the rain
with charm and mischief.

Didn’t Michaelangelo claim that he was just
releasing forms trapped in adamantine?
Or was that Rodin?

I can hear Ruskin and Rothko tut-tutting
my pathetic infractions. Still,
I can’t get over it — those spitting images:
that lion’s gray-green mane gilded in the morning sun,
Monkey’s inane petrotechnics, provocative and protective,
the dark mossy bark in the crotch of Aunt Sally’s hemlock thighs.

I come back to Guston’s late boots and cigarettes,
and his bulbous horizontal congregations
with light bulbs flipping us on and off:
tragic cartoons for the chaos of our chunky lives.


Previously published in The Plenitudes (Summer) 17 July 2024.

(c) 2025 Richard Collins

The Samadhi of Words

            Delusion itself is satori.

                        – Kodo Sawaki


Bai Juyi used to beat himself up
for not being able to rid himself
of poetry, the last attachment.*

He shouldn't have been so hard on himself:
after all, there is such a thing as
the samadhi of words.

Now, the satori of words is a common
phenomenon in the literature of Zen:
an innocent conversation, then: POP!

goes the weasel of enlightenment.
Poetry is different. The punchline is not
the point: it’s the meditative state that matters.

The journey not the destination
is a threadbare cliche, but each day
must be lived on its own terms, okay.

Samadhi not as a funerary monument,
nor as intense concentration, a high
the opposite of dizziness: hishiryo.

Thinking-not-thinking, yes, but the magic
of samadhi is absorption, and for me
(and Bai Juyi) what absorbs the mind is poetry.

“After deep study of the empty dharma / All life’s flora has fallen away / All but the demon poetry / A glimpse of wind or moon, and, ugh, I’m at it again.” — Bai Juyi

Previously published in Willows Wept Review 34 (Fall 2024).

Stages on Life’s Way

I wanted to write poems epic in scale
with ink distilled from the charcoal remains
of Gutenbergs penned with cormorants’ quills
on paper the size of trireme sails.

I wanted to write sonnets, no, not perfect
sonnets, but poems pretty as the press
of a thigh in a swing in a painting by
Boucher on mauve paper soft
as the bellies of newborn mice.

I wanted to write a check on an ice cube
I could cash in the middle of September
in the midst of a major U.S. city
without a credit card, passport, or any
form of accepted I.D.

I wanted to write an epigram, just one,
to be remembered, on the butt of a gun
or the button of a baseball cap.

I wanted to write something, sometime,
somewhere, something about faces and places,
even disgraces and their traces, for someone
who might give a damn. Why not now?
Being of sound mind,
why not now?


Previously published in Blue Violin 6 (2000).

(c) 2025 Richard Collins

The Zen Monk to His Designer Dog

I speak metaphorically of course but you have
the eyes of a philosopher with a fluffy face.

There was a time when I would only cuddle cats,
but there was always something missing —
their aloofness, I suppose, but also the hissing,
tarted up in their tuxedos, spats and white cravats.

Sometimes I wonder when I’m speaking to you
if you understand what I’m talking about.
You gaze with such sage curiosity and doubt
as though you get me, or at least would like to.

Then you nip at my knuckles like they’re your chew toys
or leap into bed and lave my ears with your velvet tongue,
something I confess I may enjoy too much.
Then we wrestle like a couple of buddha boys.

I speak metaphorically of course, but you have
the eyes of a philosopher with a fluffy face.

Previously published in Alien Buddha Zine 61 (April 2024).

(c) 2025 Richard Collins


Yesterday’s Successes

            And what costume shall the poor girl wear.   
            To all tomorrow’s parties?
                        —Nico singing “All Tomorrow’s Parties”

 

The houses we took such pride in building
outlive us—

everything does

Our paychecks evaporate
like shipwrecks on invisible reefs
and only flotsam survives
the purchases that were supposed to prove us

souvenirs of ourselves

Our fashionable clothing
so satisfying for a season
seems somehow immortal
hanging in someone else’s closet
             ghostly, cartoonish
still smelling of us and our pleasures
            goodwill promises

Even our well-worn gloves will succeed us
princely, limpid and still warm
            soft to the touch
long after our knuckles are cold arthritic claws

Our hats will keep their shape
long after we have lost our heads

But not our loves—

our loves slacken, blacken, blue
even more mortal than us
as mortal as organic raspberries—
             infected
with that speck of fur tonight
by morning corrupted thoroughly
all the tender seeded blushing flesh
cocooned in an overcoat of wooly rot

Loves wax like candle flames
and waning
            drip white lava that burns
labia that fake no feeling
for an instant only
            a clown’s disingenuous grin

Joys flicker, flare, splutter
            and disappear
like yesterday’s successes.

(c) 2025 Richard Collins