Poem by Joanie DiMartino

A $50 Donation Will Help Feed a Poet for One Week

Meet Marc Martin.
He lives in Philadelphia,
an urban center on the East Coast.
Through no fault
of his own, Marc was born
into an alliterative name.
He struggles—every day—
with the assonance
and consonance
of his moniker,
working as a spoken word
artist on South Street
during humid summer
months in the Delaware
River Valley.

Alessandra-Marie Foster completed
a prestigious MFA program
years ago, yet still suffers
from chronic bohemianism
on the outskirts of Seattle, where
she’s forced to share
living space with seven
other artists
in a renovated, three-story,
wood and stone dwelling.

And then there’s Bryony Winthrop,
a New England girl.
An accident at age three
left her able to speak only in rhyming
couplets. Through your generous
support her family recently
purchased a dictionary, providing
the help she needed,
and now she’s on her way
to writing lyrical free verse,
as she slowly escapes the stifling
world of formalism.

These are just a few examples
of the thousands
of lives touched by the Poetic
Resource Mission,
an organization dedicated
to helping poets maintain
their just-above-poverty-level
living standards.

Think about it:
for $50 a week, or $7 a day, the price
of your daily large latte with soy
milk and hazelnut flavoring,

you could help a poet
make rent one week late,

or provide a nourishing meal
of Ramen noodles, store-brand chips,
and syrupy mandarin oranges,

or enable several poets to collectively
drum up enough change for gas money
to carpool to the nearest open-mic reading.

Someday, the Poetic Resource
Mission hopes to provide
each and every poet with a copy
of Poet’s Market Directory,
subsidy assistance for contest
entry fees, and much-needed medical
attention for stabbed backs
and bruised egos.

Your generous, tax-exempt donation
will help us meet these goals,
and keep starving poets writing.
Please, support
the Poetic Resource Mission.

Won’t you help?

Joanie DiMartino has work published in many literary journals and anthologies, including Modern Haiku, Alimentum, Calyx, and Amethyst Arsenic. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Licking the Spoon, and Strange Girls. She hosts Soup & Sonnets: A Monthly Literary Salon for Women, and directs the Hidden Treasures Poetry Series in partnership with the Courtyard Art Gallery in downtown Mystic, CT. A historian as well as a poet, DiMartino is currently at work on a collection of poems about the 19th-century whaling industry.

Cindy K. Williams: is a 1985 graduate of the Art Institute of Houston who now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This is my all time favorite thing to do, hitting the streets with my camera.”