This week we are proud to feature “Achluophilia” by Jessica Piazza.  The poem is previously unpublished.  Jessica Piazza was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.  She is co-founder of Bat City Review, a contributing editor at The Offending Adam,  and an editor for The Gold Line Press Chapbook Contest.  When she’s not working on publishing other people’s poems, she writes her own…some of which have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, National Poetry Review, Rattle, 32 Poems, No Tell Motel and Barrelhouse.

Author’s Note:

For a few years I basically only wrote formal poems whose titles were clinical phobias or clinical philias.  I’m clearly obsessed with obsession, and though forms can be an obsession in and of themselves, I was also really into the play that sonics allow: how different meters and insistent internal rhyme and alliteration can produce a sound that I hope mimics the pulse of the poems’ obsessive fears and loves.  Achluophilia is a Sapphic, and I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with that form; perfect, maybe, for a love poem about darkness.  But I hope the music beats like a tell-tale heart beneath the floor of the poem.  And I hope, more importantly, that you all have fun reading it. Because there’s plenty of obsession in our little world of poetry, but maybe not enough fun.