VIDEO: Advance Release from Motionpoems Season 5

Motionpoems is an organization that brings video artists and publishing companies together to create video shorts of poetry, aptly dubbed “motionpoems.” Started by Angella Kassube and Todd Boss, animator/producer and poet, respectively, Motionpoems has gone on to partner with such companies as Wave Books, Graywolf Press, McSweeney’s, and several others to bring poetry into a new medium. Following a premiere at the Walker Art Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, the fifth season of motionpoems is currently being released via Motionpoems’ subscription. Augury Books has the honor of being able to preview one of season five’s poems before it is sent out! View Matthew Zapruder’s “Albert Einstein,” adapted by John Akre, below:

In addition to a new season of work, Motionpoems and Todd Boss recently produced “Arrivals & Departures at St. Paul’s Union Depot,” a video-art installation on the Union Depot building in St. Paul, set to premiere October 10-12 at the St. Paul Art Crawl. Motionpoems will soon be taking submissions from U.S. poets for next year’s installation! Check back at the “Arrivals & Departures” page above for updates.

 

 

Poem by Saara Myrene Raappana

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Photo by Dave Bledsoe of FreeVerse Photography

Canticle of Waitresses, Waiting

 

This is how we herded by the waitress station,

waiting, as the town, turned down to one by snow,

settled like a gown that smothered all that ailed us.

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How we first heard about the hostages

on Facebook, and then the town knelt down to zero,

still as snow once it resolves itself to ground.

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How the sidewalk still needed seeding with rock salt.

How even when a person stands still, they can slip.

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How we counted the seeds of our blessings.

How our blessings rebounded off the booths like buckshot.

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How we each sometimes rebound into being

a country of one self.

How we other times are one self of a city.

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How only below zero can we remember

September as that country where we save daylight

like fat over our muscles.

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How a woman ran at the chained gym doors

to save her daughter.

How she dropped on the unseeded walk.

How we’ll remember her legs as

a fleet of hummingbirds skidding through snow.

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How sometimes, to give something a shot means kill it.

How other times it means just close your eyes.

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First published in Iron Horse Literary Review, Labor Day Issue 2013

Saara Myrene Raappana‘s poems appear in such publications as 32 Poems, Blackbird, Cream City Review, Subtropics, The Gettysburg Review, and Verse Daily. She grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in southern China. She’s an editor for Cellpoems, a poetry journal distributed via text message.