Praying Mantis

(An In-titled Poem)    

i try naming 
a traipsing 

gray stain    
in my past

is it     pain?   

it is May;     
martins     nip gnats… 

in my art     i am
prying ants

apart     again—  

i am a     migrant
straying     in my past…          

rapt in     spring     rain  
i am     aspirant: 

i sing; i try…

Stephanie L. Harper grew up in Northern California; attended college in Iowa and Germany (BA in English and German from Grinnell College); completed graduate studies and gave birth to her first child in Wisconsin (MA in German literature from University of Wisconsin – Madison); homeschooled and raised her extraordinary son and daughter to adulthood in Oregon; and now lives in Indianapolis, IN—with the world’s most adorable husband and cat, no less—where she completed her MFA in Poetry at Butler University. Harper is a Best of the Net and four-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in the Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, Whale Road Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Vox Populi, The Night Heron Barks, Foothill Journal, Resurrection Magazine, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere. Praying Mantis is an “In-titled Poem”—Harper's invented form—which is a poem composed exclusively of the letters appearing in its title, with no letter occurring more often within any individual word than it does in the title.

Published October 8 2022