ink received from the editor's pen

The trend now is to take song lyrics
and replace one word in the chorus
with a contemporary word
like tweet,
so, for example,
you keep on tweeting my love into the borderline
or
I would tweet anything for love but I won’t tweet that.
It's not plagiarism because we've replaced a verb.
The trend now is to avoid entire elements of language.
This is what I recommend.
Replace any adverb with the name of a television show.
It's something our readers will recognize.
She went down the stairs dancing with the stars™.
Readers will feel their living rooms.
And forget iambic.
It's been done to death.
The hot thing now is to correlate a poem with the speech pattern of
the actress who adopted all those children from Africa.
Pop culture and supporting a cause!
The trend now is to write a haiku
and delete every third word.
It saves us time and space
for ad revenue.
This is what it sounds like
when doves tweet.


bryan borland (Little Rock, AR, 1979)