Rosebud Ben-Oni

“every now & then i get a little bit lonely”

by Rosebud Ben-Oni

 

before touching my face
kill the chickens
while i sleep

 

Copyright©2017 Rosebud Ben-Oni. Reprinted with permission of the author. First published in B O D Y

 

Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a CantoMundo Fellow. She is the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013) and an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her poems appear in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, among others; recently, her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog, and teaches creative writing at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. Find her at 7TrainLove.org

Why Poetry Matters:
“I’ve written this before, but as both a reader and writer, of poetry these words grow truer each day:  Poetry is the lifecycle song of the fire, from language. Poetry alone remains entirely approaching a new world, without the need to claim physical space, or occupy another’s land. For me, poetry is the truest of forward movement.”