mapping the nest
Photo by Patrick Hendry via Unsplash : A couple of weeks ago I posted the following message on a friend’s Facebook page in response to her incredibly astute and poignant comment about why women don’t talk about sexual trauma until years later (if ever). I will ask for her permission to post her comment here…. Continue Reading →
Photo by Fabrizio Conti via Unsplash Rites of Passage : I The rock was thrown as a joke, a sleight of hand. Then, the bursting eye, the entrails- like stuff pouring out. I knew it was an eye, but it looked like an unhatched egg, the embryo throbbing with its own hunger for life. It... Continue Reading →
Photo by Tom Barett via Unsplash Room with a View : All I can see out the window is your absence trimming the landscape. : First published in One Sentence Poems, September 2018
Photo by Martino Pietropoli via Unsplash The Guest : My house grows small waiting for her to leave. Today I opened the door to the cellar and it wasn’t there. I climbed the staircase to the attic— it ended in a dead wall. The bathroom I’ve been so proud of shrank to the size... Continue Reading →
Photo by Fabrice Villard via Unsplash : Winter : A woman writes a line in the snow and leaves. Nothing else is new in that quiet field. Large snowflakes seal in her words, an envelope, closing. Next summer, she won't remember what she has written, or why. In the wake of retreating steps, silence keeps the... Continue Reading →
Photo by Dan Rowden via Unsplash : Small Truths, You Said : We never have enough of them. Open your palm, hold this one. See how fragile it is? Even your breath could kill it. Don't breathe. The light on the water drew back, the tide came in. Your voice was a litany of shadows.... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of pixabay.com : Out of the Labyrinth : In the morning the girl sits by the window, pulling dried husks of flies off the spider web. The brown spider drops from its corner on a glistening, tremulous thread, hauls itself up to inspect the damage, hairpin legs climbing the air on invisible steps.... Continue Reading →
Greg Spalenka Divinus : Tentative Futures : You try to forgive words their push and pull. In the garden, the cherry tree has sprouted buds, each one enveloping a heartbeat. You lean against the trunk, listening to the hum under its bark, remembering what it was like to carry that same echo deep in the... Continue Reading →
Dominique Appia Entre les trous de la memoire / Between the Holes in the Memory : Forecast : It can always be worse: what you cling to could be a ledge over a subterranean river or a bridge tucked away in a sentence no one can read. Each memory— a shattered puzzle. It could be... Continue Reading →
Rene Magritte Explanation I wrote this poem years ago during a writing exercise in graduate school, while pregnant with my first child. Reading E. T. A. Hoffman's Gothic stories around that time may have had something to do with that foreboding ending... : Poem for a Green Bottle and a Candle Held Together with Tape... Continue Reading →
Edvard Munch The Scream : Fear : It never goes away, it only diminishes, thins out like a bookmark you forget in one of the books you now rarely read. Then you find it while dusting one day. It springs out voluptuous, huge—this bosomy aunt who always arrives out of nowhere to stay, suitcases... Continue Reading →
Millicent Sowerby Wee Willie Winkie : Wee Willie Winkie : Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town, Upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown. Rapping at the window, crying through the lock, “Are the children all in beds? Now it’s eight o’clock.” ... Continue Reading →
Leonard Myburgh Airbrushed Lion Courtesy of lonehillart.com : The Lion : Every angel is terrifying. ~ Rilke He comes in the dark, breaks doors, muscles his way through windows. His wings wrap around my heart like sin. His words run through my... Continue Reading →
Gerard Gauci Scene from "Armide" at the Palace of Versailles Image courtesy of operaatelier.com : Spectator : I’ll always be part of an audience— not the worst crowd to melt in, though observers are often portrayed as distant, uninvolved. I, too, am an observer. I watch the plot thicken and flare up toward denouement, and... Continue Reading →
Winter sky over Lausanne, Switzerland : The Photograph : It doesn’t matter what we should have argued about. Talking was something we couldn't or wouldn't do. We walked through a meadow instead, you slightly ahead and I taking pictures of things I wanted to remember, including that bloody sunset. The flowers parted before... Continue Reading →
N. C. Wyeth Rip Van Winkle : Rip Van Winkle In the evening she sits on the couch. The sunset starts a fire around her head, like a halo. She reads and her hair streams down in black coils past her waist, past her knees. It hesitates when it reaches the floor, but... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of Alan Harris via hiveminer.com : Murder in the Orchard : Nobody wants to handle the dead bird, its beak cracked as an omen. We read a tear, or is it only the implacable glass of the eye, watching? None of us comes even near the limp body in the dirt. We circle... Continue Reading →
Migrating Snow Geese in Pennsylvania Photo courtesy of WabbyTwaxx via Birdshare : Migration : When the season ends, we flock South to the house of unfinished poems. Tired birds, we crowd in its rooms. Though close enough, our wings barely touch. They sweep the dust off the floor, the cobwebs off the ceiling. We have never tasted... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of http://www.napowrimo.net/ The Date (Notes to Self) Calm, cool, and collected, Poetry knocks at your door. I know you want to let him in. You should--no argument from me. But firstly, there are some things you might want to consider before cracking the door open and gazing into those dreamy eyes. That fireplace you... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.org “Beauty like that is strength. […] One could turn the world upside down with beauty like that.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky “The Idiot” This page is dedicated to the work of human spirit: the things that feed our soul, keep us warm, make us grow. A brooding bird will often pluck its own... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of www.stevegettle.com A good part of my childhood was spent in my grandmother’s village, where I grew up believing that the mud nests the swallows built under our eaves brought us good luck. More swallow nests meant better luck. I remember the joy when yet another swallow family would choose to raise its young under... Continue Reading →
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. ~ William Blake My neighbors are temporarily storing a barn door in the hallway of our apartment building. It’s intricately carved, iron-studded, worn by wind, rain, the hands of several generations of farmers. I dare not ask why... Continue Reading →
Photo by Tim Laman Speaking for the Trees : This page is an homage to things in nature that nourish a poet’s imagination: the roots and moss of poetry that contemplates, accepts, and embraces. So where does one start mapping this nest? Where does the glossary of tangible symbols that permeate a poet’s work begin?... Continue Reading →
Image courtesy of www.littleterns.org Poets throughout history have turned to animal and mineral being to express their own because from that storehouse a larger vocabulary of being, particularity, and wisdom can emerge. ~ Jane Hirshfield “Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry” Some poems are pebbles and some are sand. This sounds like the beginning of... Continue Reading →
