The Tangled Branch Discussion Forums

Looking forward to reading something from you! B

Rattle does not accept work that has been previously curated, in print or online—poems may be self-published on social media, blogs, or message boards, but cannot have been published in books, magazines, or similar collections open to the public. We want to be the first publisher to highlight the p...

Really like the last stanza. And the rest was interesting enough to get me there! 

Thanks Eric and Mark. Yeah, I've often wondered about abbreviations and acronyms in poetry. They have different meanings, but are similar when understood.  Thinking about it, the long form should be used here instead of the abbreviation...it looks lazy; unlike acronyms.  All acronyms can be abbrevi...

Small things hold the secrets, aggregated grains of sand or pastes of soil, fixate and fascinate. Colleges of unruly electrons concealed, yet smeared so far out, scream 'I'm here FFS!' We'll see them eventually, probably, not where they were supposed to be but delighted by the introduction all the ...

Sadducee You who have cast me as your enemy, if I knelt before you, dressed in simple garment, knelt on hard ground over a stone bowl filled with pure water, stayed steady on my knees, determined, washed your feet, first one, then the other, washed them earnestly as prescribed by your source of scr...

Thank you Eric.

I really like this poem, and read it as an exploration of energy and old age and growing up and the wisdom of the young that the old leave behind. questions/nits. Blue/lanterns? - not sure what that would reference, blue as in mood? blue light? doesn't quite hit anything for me. Could just be me. I ...

A poem containing the knowledge that it's unfashionable to write of 'home' while potentially writing of home and tricking past the reader some details of Sligo landscapes and what makes it amazing. The sense of the Irish abroad - being forced into exile (for art, poverty, adventure, ambition, the cr...

I read this as an exploration of human kind's insignificance and a playful exploration of the role of 'god' in all of this, with us as having no more significance than a 'scab' that s/he likes to itch, but suggesting that maybe we have a slight more importance than mere light or matter, but not much...