"Reading in the Red" - Upcoming Poetry Reading in Seattle on July 20th

Upcoming Poetry Reading in Seattle

The poets, including myself, who were involved in last year's National Poetry Month Initiative, "Pulitzer Remixer," will be reading from their collections in Seattle on February 28th, 2014, in conjunction with the AWP Conference. This will be my first poetry reading in Seattle!

Crashing Alone

Lightning struck like severed veins

and threw him crashing alone.

He lay on a funeral mound 

of pictures, forgotten board games.

Men murmured in the oak floor, 

women through pipes around the room.

Voices widened cracks into gaps.

A breeze blew through; the plaster sank

exhausted, crushing his ghost house.

Note: A found poem. Source: Harding, Paul. Tinkers. New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2010. Print.

"Crashing Alone" was first published in Luciferous.  Jan. 2014. Online.

http://luciferouszine.blogspot.com/2014/01/crashing-alone-by-caroline-n-simpson.html?zx=91bfac66f08d2f36

"The Modigliani Daughter" performed at an Open Mic Night

Children, Church & Daddies, the magazine that published my poem, "The Modigliani Daughter," read it aloud at an open mic night in Chicago last weekend. You can watch it on youtube at this link.  Mine is the first one read after the intro.  It's neat to hear someone else read it aloud!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7OX1Suq_LU&feature=youtu.be

The Fortune Cookie

He didn’t know there was a fortune

Inside the cookie

His stomach busy coding the message

Eating away at the letters

Into an unreadable form

To know his fate was clearly stated

In his hands just minutes earlier

Is maddening

What choice does he have now

But to live in the moment

As if his fate was never determined

The truth lying deep in his gut.

Published in Ascent Aspirations. October 2013. Online
http://www.ascentaspirations.ca/thefortunecookie.htm,
and first published in Bear Creek Haiku. June 2013. Print.

Interview

My new friend and writer, Bryn Gribben, recently published an interview of me on her blog, This Gemlike Flame, as part of a series she calls, "Why Can’t I Be You?: Great Women I Admire, Qualities I Don’t Have." 

Check it out here: 
Interview 1: Carrie Simpson

Blood Poppy

She slices me with her paper wings.

It’s deafening, her piercing the virgin green

popping azure skies with her incarnadine.

She’s Pluto’s puppet, I am sure,

Proserpina’s pomegranate 

bleeding through the grass

pleading with me, a sea skimmer, 

a skipping stone tempted by the wine-dark;

the slope to the abyss curls and unfurls,

a dying fiddlehead inviting us to slide, 

to drip with Dali’s clock into the dark.

Pricked, I follow her figure with my eyes,

roots melded to the underworld,

slender body bending with supple grass,

finale of carbuncle. I fear 

a piece of red glass plummeting

unnoticed, a speck of dust to Neptune,

polished to pitch dark death.

Stay above ground! she screams in silence,

stares me down with her charcoal chasm.

We are atop this color wheel of Fortune now!

First published in Third Wednesday.  Fall 2012, Vol. 4, Issue 4. Print.