Rachelyn farrell

Research Scientist
Narrative Intelligence Lab
University of Kentucky
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Category: Poetry

  • Jezebel – Interactive Poetry

    Jezebel – Interactive Poetry

    Click the vowels to read the poem. (Or click here to play in a separate window)

  • On Reading (Sonnet)

    There is a point when writing’s not enough. When quippy verses fade into a stew of diaries relating daily triumphs, nuisances, and other such banalities. But wherefore would I take the time to read those drippy ruminations of another listless poet, deep in their own misgivings and tired projections of losses and finalities? Unless, of…

  • Poems like Puberty

    (a crude attempt at a follow-up to “Poems like Pixels”) Poems, like puberty present themselves when you’re least prepared, no pen in your hand, no pad in your ‘wear, and the rush to acquire such necessary items leads only to leakage, to the loss of what’s there. And who but a pubert or poet would…

  • Poems like Pixels

    Poems, like pixels, all spread out and presenting a picture despite their partial, and perhaps complete, irrelevance. To be fixated on a particular pixel is to be missing the picture, mistaking a brick for the castle… Though put together with precision and care, it by itself is not all that is there nor was ever…

  • Wands

    Prickly branches, stickily soaked in sap and little leaves; sticking out like sticks that stick out from the ground. And such a stick is nothing but a stick, unless beheld by brainy and/or brawny men, in which case not beheld as in the sense as been bespoke before; but as in that of banderoles and…

  • Heatwave (Tritina)

    (Tritina – a mini Sestina) My lids can shield the light but not the heat. I lift them once every seven steps, and blindly let them fall again behind my feet. Then red, inverted shadows guide my feet to crunch along this clearing through the heat, for seven steps more, and a bit less blindly but…

  • Politics and Beans

    Relentless evening news reports a victory for them, a devastating loss for all our champions on the Hill. She rolls her eyes and feigns annoyance, stirs the pot of beans, and faithfully supports her team, and knows she always will. Unless– Perhaps she’ll wake up in this world and find she’s really in it, and…

  • The Not-So-Dearly Departed

    It was dark at dusk in downtown Denton and damp in the ditch where the dew had not drained, and, as dead as the dirt daubers down in the trenches, lay Duchess Delaney of Denton’s remains. Once white were the dresses now drenched by the grime of the muddy recesses of Mortimer Lane, and morbid…

  • The Thing about Words (Triolet)

    (Triolet – certain lines have to be repeated word-for-word in a specific order throughout the poem, changing only in punctuation.) My words can say anything I want, but the truth is that what I really think is bleeding through. And whether or not my words can say anything, I want to force them to do…

  • Symmetric about a Wonky Axis

    Our lives, though they do at times seem tangled, frazzled and chaotic and unmatched, are symmetric about a wonky axis, curving and veering and returning and nearing and ever in order, that is, from the current perspective. I’m happy to live on a line like that, weaving through other people’s lines and such. It’s delightfully…