Michael R. Clark

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "Holocene Reconnaissance"

This poem references a real book, Mysteries of the Unexplained, but it might have been Strange Stories, Amazing Facts or any number of tomes that I had (and still have) in my library of folklore, mythology, and field guides to monsters. Among the more terrifying images of Bigfoot, Nosferatu, and

News

My Chapbook Got Shortlisted!

I'm thrilled to share that my chapbook, "The Patron Saint of Getting On With It," has been shortlisted for the Beyond Words Chapbook Prize. Read more here: https://www.instagram.com/p/De96aZRIF2g/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&rpxt=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ== View this post on

News

Palette Poetry Nature Prize

I am pleased to share that my poem "Strange Attractor" has been selected by guest judge Kimiko Hahn as the second runner-up of the Palette Poetry 2026 Nature Poetry Prize. You can read it here. This piece has been long-gestating; I've been working on

Friday Poem: "Percolation Network"

For a long while I was kind of obsessed with the concept of fractal geometry; not that I had or have any idea what the math actually looks like or how it operates, but from the books I read about it, fractals felt like the most poetic field in math.

Friday Poem: "Medusa's Wig"

Here's yet another Topsail Beach poem. Swimming in the Atlantic off the North Carolina coast after a storm can lead to a few shocks as big clumps of seaweed cruise at ankle-depth in the turbid water. Medusa’s Wig A swirl of seaweed, a cold clutch of

Friday Poem: "Fallow"

In the 1980s, Germantown, Maryland was still a bit rural. I lived in a neighborhood on Schaeffer Road that was directly across the street from a cattle farm, owned by the enigmatic Mr. Hargett. His cows would often gather near the fence in the mornings, watching me as I waited

Friday Poem: "Eden Reconsidered"

My friends Melissa and Jay have a framed cross-stitch—I assume a wedding gift—hanging in their house that reads: "Same old slippers Same old rice Same old glimpse Of Paradise" I've never asked them who made it, but its homespun kitschiness (lines from an

Friday Poem: "In The Abandoned Asylum"

Spring Grove Hospital is a sprawling mental health facility in Catonsville, Maryland, near the UMBC campus. It has a long and storied history as one of the oldest mental hospitals in the country. In my early college days, we used to venture out late at night from the dorms, seeking

Friday Poem: "June, Mostly Cloudy, Chance of Storms"

This poem happened on a gray afternoon in our first house in Baltimore after my first year as a public school teacher, which might account for the emotional state of the first stanza. "Tiwaz" is the 17th letter in the Elder Futhark runes and resembles an upward-pointing

Friday Poem: "Strong Wind, January, Suburbia"

This poem happened a few months after our daughter Hazel was born. A November baby, her first trips out into the world were bundled in winter clothes. I'm posting it now to hopefully take our collective minds off the heat that seems to be cooking us the world

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "White Ground Road"

The setting for this poem is a tar-sealed road that winds through the farms and park land between Germantown and Boyds, Maryland. I was so happy to discover via Google Maps that it has not yet been developed; from a satellite view, it looks largely like it did back

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "Pulling Ticks"

The black Lab in this poem, Chrissie, belonged to our parents' best friends, the Coffrens; our cousins-by-choice, Tracy and Frankie, were tasked with clearing her of parasites after she had been gone for hours on romps in the meadows and underbrush of rural Poolesville. These kinds of

poem

Friday Poem: "Foundation Settling"

My parents moved out of our house in Germantown, Maryland in the mid 2000s. I can still Zillow-stalk it from the last time it was on the market; the photos of my former childhood bedroom are unrecognizable now. Foundation Settling Alone in my box of night,  the uppermost room

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "Midwife"

Here is another poem inspired by Topsail Island, North Carolina, where I spent a week each summer of my childhood with my family and friends. One year we were fortunate enough to participate in a loggerhead turtle rescue at a nest site a few steps away from the cottage where

essay

The VHS Files: Teaching Machines the Poetry of Steak in Cronenberg's The Fly

In the ‘80s, there was a boom in remakes of great horror movies from the ‘40s and ‘50s (most of these pretty campy, and definitely unscary): The Thing, The Blob, and The Fly all have stood the test of time and are regarded as classics today. (Invaders from Mars and

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "Techniques of Avalanche Survival"

I was a Boy Scout in suburban Maryland in the 80s. I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the organization; I really did enjoy camping and being outdoors, but I resented the paramilitary "ranks" that seemed required for ongoing membership. I never progressed beyond "

Horror Movies

What's Eating Us? The Stuff, Consumer Culture, and LLMs

Back in the mid-’80s, Larry Cohen made an over-the-top body horror riff on The Blob called The Stuff, where unsuspecting Americans discover a mysterious white goo bubbling out of the ground that turns out to be both delicious and malevolently sentient. Once you eat it, it takes

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "Falling Asleep With the Dog"

Here's an early poem, one of my first publications, that I wrote about my Boston terrier, Harvey. Like many of his breed, he had a big personality in a small package. One of his more quirky traits was his nightly routine of digging a nest in the covers,

Friday Poem

Friday Poem:"Empty Orchestra"

This poem is based in a vivid experience I had with my friends in Topsail Beach, North Carolina, back in my college days. Every summer my parents would rent a cottage on Topsail Island, and as the years went on, the house and the guest list got larger; one year

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "Pelican"

Here is another poem (like "Anatomy of a Five-Lined Skink") where the speaker seeks visual analogies among different natural textures, colors, and materials. Pelican The endless sky above the sea is a web of crossing flight paths— gulls, sandpipers, kingfishers, the occasional crow, somehow out of place.

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "Turkey Buzzard"

People in my family, inexplicably, tended to use "vulture" and "buzzard" interchangeably, even though a buzzard is a bird of prey, while the bird I'm describing here is a scavenger, the turkey vulture. They seem to have grown more and more common in Maryland,

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "Stag Beetle"

This is another poem that has me pondering how my own memory and perception work, and the possibility that the vivid images I have in my mind don't represent my real experiences. On the Atlantic coast where I grew up, large and exotic-looking critters were rare, but

essay

Get Real: Seeing, Making, and Resisting AI Slop

Science confirms what I have come to feel in my bones in the last two years: LLMs are making my students less creative.   A piece in the New York Times last week clocks the decline in “substance” in student writing (specifically, the notorious college essay) even as the use of

Friday Poem: "O Full of Scorpions"

This poem's title alludes to Macbeth's line that concludes, "...is my mind, dear wife." When I was a kid, I seemed to absorb all kinds of strange advice when I was in the Boy Scouts. One rule we had when camping was to always

Friday Poem

Friday Poem: "Anatomy of a Five-Lined Skink"

As someone who has been diagnosed with ADHD late in life, I have had a hard time reconciling my past experiences with this new (to me) lens of neurodivergence. When I reread past poems like this one, which I originally wrote when I was in my 20s, it becomes much