Category Archives: Prayers and Curses

Of Ice Crystals and Flaming Hearts

Posted on November 27, 2018 by Mark Kerstetter

My poem, The Effulgent Heart is out now in the new issue of Survivor’s Review. It’s a poem very close to my own heart. I wrote it at the end of the cycle of poems that became my chapbook Prayers … Continue reading →

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Prayer for Tomorrow

Posted on December 6, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

Monday morning, 9:30 your life will change —from Prayer for Tomorrow, the first poem of my chapbook, One Step: prayers and curses. On the 12th of this month it will be exactly one year ago. I was at work when … Continue reading →

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On Illness as Metaphor

Posted on November 27, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

Note: I wrote the following earlier this year and for obscure reasons didn’t want to share it then. Now, with the publication of my cancer related poems, the time is right.   A quick scan of the reviews of Susan … Continue reading →

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One Step: Prayers and Curses

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

My Prayers and Curses chapbook of poems will be published by Atomic Theory Micro Press in an edition of fifty hand-sewn and numbered copies. Pre-sale begins on the 30th.  

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Thorn Ladder

Posted on April 30, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

Blood rose your body the earth line scorched barbed too within it I’m caught if you can’t move I’m stuck post-human you and I wedded beyond mystery on the cusp caught or idled in line on the line to be … Continue reading →

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In the Chemo Room

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

We who are turned away from the star —Blanchot There’s no one here like the girl in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, left awake in the clear morning after night’s watch. Here, today, everyone is old, floating on feeble cheerfulness, the relief or … Continue reading →

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If There Were a Heaven, It Would Stink with Life

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

maledicta Paradisus in qua tantum cacatur! —William of Auvergne Blanchot wrote that Nietzsche was the first to teach us that, “if you begin to think, then you can hope for no rest.” [The Writing of the Disaster, p 123] And … Continue reading →

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Acéphale

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

  Masson saw skulls spilled in Champagne, tried to box the damage in canvas. In a new year pomegranates are lucky, they say. If one is offered with bowed head take it—take four, like Persephone. Antioxidant or IED is not … Continue reading →

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