Minor Arcana Press has just published an amazing new poetry anthology, entitled Drawn to Marvel: Poems From the Comic Books. It includes poems by the likes of John Ashbery, Rae Armantrout, Dorianne Laux, Tony Barnstone, Denise Duhamel, and many others, which can be found here:
Drawn To Marvel - Contributors & Press
The anthology includes this poem of mine:
The Fantastic Four
After the phone call with my three siblings,
I remember our childhood, the four of us pretending
to be The Fantastic Four superheroes from Marvel comics:
Stretcho, the Invisible Girl, her brother the Torch,
their rock-man friend The Thing. Each imbued with a gift—
elasticity, invisibility, fire, strength. My two brothers,
my sister and I, perfect incarnations of this quartet
as we’d run the sidewalks confronting the hidden villains
of quiet suburban streets. Looming in the distance,
the adult world of parents sagging onto couches at day’s end,
wistfully lingering over Ray Charles’
Take These Chains From My Heart and Set Me Free.
It was a world only the brave could face,
which we did, slowly transmogrifying
into the adult heroes we wanted to become.
As now: phone cradled, silent,
mother’s stroke menacing our horizon,
but the telepathy still working,
the call springing us into action—
an invisible force-field to bind us, together,
in flame, the irreducible strength of stone,
the heart stretching, stretching.
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