For this latest entry in my series of tributes to poets I know, I celebrate and acknowledge S. R. Mason. A writer, photographer, and poet, her main outlet for poetry is her Tumblr blog, titled Think of Me As Poetry.

Love is a frequent theme in her poems. However, her protagonists do not experience love in their heads (or with their heads in the clouds), but in their bodies—tongues, eyes, ribs, fists, fingers, teeth, and so on—whether it is pain, pleasure, or indifference. Water is another element that regularly appears in her work—sometimes a benevolent, healing presence, other times an oppressor, or sometimes an object of desire.

Still in her early 20s, Steph (as you might know her if you follow her on Twitter), has a way with phrasing that you’d expect from someone my age. Or—to be more honest—that I wish I had.

On several occasions, I have found inspiration in her poems, most notably:

Ghosts that leave footprints
The past ending in an exhale
What to listen for in a cold war of visual cues.
‘Goodbye’ is a confusion we feel comfortable ignoring.’

As part of a prompt I was working from, I ended up using a line each from the last two poems in this list in poems of my own; she was kind enough to grant me permission to include them in This Is Fifty-three (the oversized volume I published last year).

As far as I know, Steph has not yet published her poems beyond her Tumblr feed; however, she is planning to publish Sugar Comma [sic], a chapbook of donut-related poems, later this year. She also occasionally posts video clips in which she reads her poems. More recently, she has begun writing music reviews for 303 Magazine.

Check out her work. You won’t regret it.

(1 August 2017)