Poetry — Annalese Press

Poetry

Authors

Toni Thomas

Toni Thomas’ poems have appeared in literary magazines in Austria, Spain, New Zealand, Canada, England, Scotland, and Australia. In the United States her work has been accepted for publication in over fifty literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner, North Dakota Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Minnesota Review, Weber-The Contemporary West, Rhino, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry East.

In addition to the books we have published at Annalese Press, Toni has three other poetry collections - Chosen, Fast as Lightning, and Walking on Water. She has received numerous awards along with twice being nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

My brother's death may seem diminutive
a quarter column in the newspaper
a funeral service with thirty folks

may seem as small as a side alley
leftover pizza
the shy man who walks with a limp
in a big mall

but if you think this way
you will miss something
the ruby in the pea
the way dim surfaces
hold colored light

how a voice sounds when it's noticed
not withered on the vine
but unpeeled

that what we truly witness saves.

"In the Big Mall"

Amazon

In this fourth collection of poems Toni Thomas explores the nature of family, emotional trauma, addiction and loss in contemporary working class America through the lens of her relationship with her brother. These poems testify to the deep bonds of love, the ties that even in the midst of hardship bind us.

Once you could see in the dark
flashed bright as a glow worm
fluorescent
my mother's lips coated you
there was no cadence of brokenness.

Once you built wood ramps
climbed a fire escape
scraped rust off the sky
broke an arm reaching
almost impervious
inside her blue halo.

"The Breakfast of the Dead"

In this fifth collection of poems Toni Thomas continues to explore the nature of family, emotional trauma, addiction and loss in contemporary working class America through the lens of her relationship with her brother. These poems testify to the deep bonds of love, the ties that even in the midst of hardship bind us.

When I cross the path to happiness
will it speak to me as a snake
devouring the mouse in the field
or bend me into another kind of being
who hers the collapse of the wind
the sun's vigilance
lozenges hope
knows the climate of
her own burning?

Toni Thomas's poems inhabit a world where love is a subversion of slinky dresses, strangers live in our shoes, sea merchants wander, jewels grow on the leafless tree, permeable girls disappear summer evenings, dangle their legs when the tongue of the river can't get enough of them, where longing and the sacred turn out to be more or less the ransom of honey.

I am your wildest casserole
a Parisian tart of complex experience the hole in your wall am tiramisu cheesecake ancient bread

bite into me slowly
watch what falls away
see what becomes of you.

Set in New York in the 1940's, this seventh collection of poems follows a young woman at the Hotsy Totsy Ballroom where dancers attempt to become artists of the imagination, salve a world weary from war, disillusionment.

At Hotsy Totsy you can meander through thigh high corn fields, a tropical rain forest, sample Paris in spring, pricey chocolate and caviar, consummate want without the rain.

All day I soothe the minefields of my life

their faulty tuitions

blue shrapnel

hemisphere of cancers

mind the bright as a button

girl child in the field.

She twines dandelion into a headdress

mothers the flowers

doesn’t yet she trampled what she gifts.

In this eighth collection, Toni Thomas’s poems explore the messy terrain of love, family, loss, beauty ...... the struggle to hold sanctity in a complex world.

In the pink arms of the city

I become the girl who hides in cafes

wordless

lives on cereal and bread

doesn’t want to mercantile her life

with a lock and key

razor image for money.

“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.”

Emily Dickinson