Welcome to The RavensPerch

(definition: a humiliating or scornful insult) Say it with me: Con-TU-me-ly. Such a beautiful word, it should mean something aesthetically elegant — maybe a mahogany rocker with carved swan arms and pale yellow brocade. Or maybe it’s an adverb with its trailing -ly...

Don’t write about your grandparents, say the poet pundits. They complain. Which means I can’t describe my grandmother lying there on the flowered davenport in perpetual grief, a crocheted afghan over her long dress, her skinny legs, her sad black shoes, her oldest...

Daily miracle: I turn the faucet and water happens. All my life. In a small dusty village in Kenya where the road doesn’t reach, kind foreigners installed a pipe. The women miss their daily walk to the river, together. Is this poem patronizing? Naive?...

Dear Ken, Do you remember Violet’s laughter? Storm’s thunder muted du Pré’s cello, in transmission. And in it I heard Violet’s laughter; distinctive, explosive chortle, joyful eruption. Contralto, never shrill, somehow intellectual, informed. Responsive to irony or...

At the start of my 70th year I bought the latest camera, a startling, surreal machine, not easily transported but one which, at the push of the shutter, “photographs” in bas relief to a depth of some few inches, contours to scale, then amazingly, adds subtle colors...

We protest dawns by fiat clocks which shriek and then are echoed all day by bitchery, fretfulness, sneers. And welcome dawns which slowly idle out of long dark nights, restless, wakeful, damp with red wine and colorless tears. Not torn from our shadow life...

Craters. Weathered scars Sealed smooth-tight. Ebony tar Heals our gaping wounds.   Marta Holliday is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. Dr. Holliday earned her Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from...

Ripped continuity Blood-red Alabama clay Paves over lost love

Shirts, drawers—starched, stiff flags— Necklace through the humid rooms, Sulk in humid air.

Fear seizes your grip Tires crunch, splutter, skid—unease Glass streets—bruisey, cruel.

It gets late so early now dinner at five not seven no wine allowed (bottles stashed behind winter boots) no appetite, food picked at, pretending, pushed around the plate or piled in a stack like a child’s broccoli or placed in a paper napkin to be tossed later...

I snuck out of the house my mother in bed with her bottles her breakfast coffee covered with a skin of cream I rode my rickety Schwinn to the library Miss Lewis looked up and smiled let me curl up in the red leather chair that crinkled while I got comfortable and...