R.B. Simon

CONTACT:
Address: 4722 Maher Ave., Madison 53716
Email: poet.r.b.simon@gmail.com
Website: https://rb-simon.squarespace.com/

BIO:
R.B. Simon is a queer, black writer who has been writing poetry since teenage angst first hit at age eleven (but she sincerely hopes it has improved with age.) She has been published in multiple journals, among them Stoneboat Literary Journal, pacificREVIEW, The Poetry Coop, Burrow Press Review, Strange Horizons, Literary Mama, Obsidian, and CALYX. She loves the expansive capacity of words, the hunt for specificity of language, and the opportunity to evoke visceral responses in an audience. She aspires to transport the reader into a crystallized moment in time or state of emotion that can be felt beyond the words. Her work typically centers around issues of identity and transformation, those moments and memories that make us who we are intersectionally and in totality, and she often relies on organic and uncultivated landscapes to illustrate those ideas and our place in the natural order and world. She enjoys painting, gardening, clothing with stripes, giraffes, and coffee-flavored caffeine. She is currently living in Madison, with her partner, teenage daughter, and four unruly little dogs. You can see more of her work on her website.

PUBLICATIONS:
Not Just the Fire, available for pre-order at Cornerstone Books.
The Good Truth, Finishing Line Press

Poetry

On Trich

Unheeded
fingertips inch inexorably
towards the itching tug
autonomous creatures
begging for a sense
of purpose
to grasp, to pull,
to urgently release from
the stubbornly selfish root
an anti-sensation
a driving diversion, then
fleeting reprieve

the psyche,
a hovering specter,
oversees the effort in
detached perplexity
held suspended
it too is pulled
if not physically
then between the knowing
and the needing
between a rut now become a trench
(now become the San Andreas)
and a climb insurmountable
as Mount Olympus
remaining transfixed
and impotent

while unrestrained
fingers wander
tracing slender plots
of destruction in their wake
almost insignificant
juxtaposed against
the weeping gouges
that shame
that defeat
carved, thoroughly concealed
on the insides
of the skin

Comfort

sliding in beside you

sheets and bed-coverings sloping away

in twisted heaps

bed bordered by derelict books, balled socks, half-filled cups

laundry languishing in piles around us,

a post-nuclear cityscape, untidy and wanting salvage,

you cerulean skinned and luminescent from the blue burning of electronic screens

the muted murmuring of the TV, koi swimming across the neglected laptop window

but we are turning off the litany: bills, dishes, work, child…

letting it all drain away in waves formed from the gliding silk

of your nightgown

skimming my skin

replete in the homeliness of our disarray

there is no place softer, more tender

than in the harbor of your arms