“—Once more the poem woke me up,
the dark poem. I was ready for it;
he was sleeping,

and across the cabin, the small furnace
lit and re-lit itself—”
     ~ Brenda Hillman, from Little Furnace

I recently heard the notion that all writers have a 'furnace image'— a mental imprint of someone or thing that first ignited their urge to write, and that never fails to fire them up. For Berryman it was, ostensibly, his father's suicide. We all have our own versions of this image.

And as the days quickly darken to their shortest length in the calendar year, many of us light our pilot lights and wait expectantly for that first blast of heat. Often it arrives violently -- banging and clanging like a call to arms -- into our homes.

In helping to select poems for December's Lobster, I looked for those that woke me up, that lit my spark, the verse that, in contrast to its very darkness, helped me to see.

Jane Ormerod’s The Birds pushes and pulls at my heartstrings with all the insistence of a child tugging at her mother's hand for one undivided moment of attention— while her mother, oblivious, sexed the world around.

Regina Smith's Ophelia in Winter might have survived, been institutionalized, and kept under the watch of some sort of voodan night nurse, who recounts Ophelia's plight in her singular vernacular...she says scars give pain texture.

Submission, by Lane Adamson, makes me anxiously turn on my porch light to peer uselessly into the trees for strangers duct-taped in plastic bags, as the nights are suddenly too long and too dark.

All by themselves, the three poems by Jason Fraley could keep me busy through the frigid months ahead. With their brain-twisting turns of syntax, there’s a surprise around every corner where the last lighthouse splits and seals the night.

Jennifer Pruden Colligan’s The Cooktop Was Smooth as Glass awakens me from a perfect Norman Rockwell fantasy with the hissing of curiously wild cats, reminding that beneath every smooth surface there is an energy we can not control.

And yet, with tone as evenly maintained as rows of shorn corn stalks, David Hurst’s the sawmill paints a vivid fire, while his hyacinth grieves as delicately as wind in the pale glow, downcast, the pure purple of divine regret.