Donald Levering's most recent poetry book, Breaking Down Familiar, placed 2nd in the National Federation of Press Women Book Award in Creative Verse. A previous book, Coltrane’s God, was runner-up in the 2016 New England Book Festival contest in poetry. Donald is a former NEA Fellow and won the 2018 Carve Magazine Contest, the 2017 Tor House Robinson Jeffers Prize, and the 2014 Literal Latté Prize.
All winter the mummified blue whale is hauled through Hungary in an oversized trailer Wherever it parks a small carnival sprouts to offer spun sugar and fortunes bouts of muscle and luck But mostly people flock to the pop-up spectacle to gawk at the whale Some are lured to a sideshow cage to stare at the oddity under the sign… Read more →
Raging dry wind slams the door startling as a gunshot waking me to the old arguments and longings. The bronzed bed I was dreaming entwined with a fruit-laden vine recedes, and I’m back here where the marriage is dead and the wind rasps parched junipers, rattles the blinds. Oh, for some moisture. I rise, go out and try to walk… Read more →
As dawn divides the sea from firmament, the island appears to float above the indigo shimmer, if there is no fog to make us forget. Clear days the joke revives— The island is uninhibited— for only in dreams is it peopled. Just last night a tribe of irrepressible hominids with blue abdomens and flourishing sex lives held the island in… Read more →