Poems Eligible for a Rhysling (Part 2)

Continuing from yesterday's post about Rhysling Award–eligible poetry . . . here's one of my speculative poems this year that appeared only in print, in the excellent poetry magazine Dreams & Nightmares, edited by David Kopaska-Merkel. Aswang Christening: A Family Photo Radiant parents and bouncy baby, all silken and crinoline, taffeta and three-piece wool, are posed in this portrait next to the baptismal font at St. George’s. The baby smells of milk and, slightly, of turned earth. They name him Malcolm. The mother, Clara, whispers to herself, she’ll swear off womb water, that sweet fetal liquor, now that she’s bearing children. Santiago, the father, thanks the parish priest but thinks to himself how plump the man is. Imagines Father Simon running for his Life, pale skin glimmering in dim forest. Behind them, in stained glass, a trick of the light turns the Holy Ghost — a dove — black, not white. —  Vince Gotera, Dreams & Nightmares (Issue 104, September 2016)                     I just remembered that when I started this blog almost ten years ago, I used to comment a little bit on the poetics of the poems of my own I would post on the blog. I originally envisioned the blog as an extension of my teaching so that both my creative-writing and my literature students could come to the blog to learn. Let me go back to that practice now. This is a hybrid sonnet (part English, part Italian, or part Shakespearean, part Petrarchan). It uses the Petrarchan envelope quatrain (abba) but is structured with a Shakespearean architecture: three quatrains and an ending couplet. I'm particularly happy with the rhyming in the third stanza: it's abba (or, in the context of the whole poem, effe) with "priest" rhyming with "forest" in lines 1 and 4, as well as "is" rhyming with "his" in lines 2 and 3. But that's not all. There's consonance in "priest" and "forest": p-r-s-t echoed by f-r-s-t (where the /p/ and the /f/ are related consonants. Besides that, the last two lines of that stanza are a couplet with two-syllable rhymes: "for his" and "forest." Ain't rhymin' fun? I should also point out this poem is part of my in-progress novella-in-poems about two Philippine monsters — mythical aswang — who fall in love, marry, and move to the US to try and live a normal (i.e., human) family life. Do check out Dreams & Nightmares. It's one of the premier speculative poetry venues in the US. And subscribe! Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don’t find the word "comments" in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ  If you got here from my list of Rhysling-eligible poems, please click here to go back to the list.