There was a frost last week in and around the Northeast Portland neighborhood where we live, a couple of miles up the hill from the Columbia River. But somehow the dahlias survived here in our micro-climate that only got to a low of 33 degrees F. I walked by other gardens where their dahlia leaves are now blackened, their unspent blooms still knobby and unopened on their stems…
I can’t remember how I came up with the title of this poem. Perhaps I wanted to invoke the notion in Christian theology about the conversion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ into homely bread and wine. In a poem about suicide—specifically death by hanging—why would I have dared to invoke the Eucharist at all…
Often the wisdom arrives in the simplest of packages and seems like it was there (and obvious) all along
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Getting ready all day yesterday and today for the arrival of family including young grandchildren early tomorrow. Getting ready means laundry
Our garden helper, Phil, was here today, pruning the vine maples, the Japanese maples, the witch hazel, the redbud
Here is a simple prompt that can be useful for generating lots of specific detail—memories, images, family history—that can then be mined for creative writing work. I made this list a while back, oh maybe in 2005. Maybe it’s time for me to revisit this prompt again!…
I am not a natural with all this digital photography. I generally like/prefer/privilege physical media—paper books, LPs, CDs, DVDs, printed photographs. But hell, the damn iPhone camera is (even when it is not the latest version) an awesome tool and I use it regularly and widely to record my adventures rambling through the days called living this life…
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My poem, “Juneteenth,” was published in Scissors & Spackle, Vol., 3: Laundry Lines: An Anthology, way back in September 2013. At the time, it took its title from Ralph Ellison’s second novel, Juneteenth; in the decade since, Juneteenth has (finally) been recognized as a National Holiday! My poem is about a very different subject, however—a vignette from June 19, 1977 when I was a very new, very young mother…
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My poem, “Caesura,” was published by Stirring way back in November 2011. A caesura is a poetic term-of-art that describes “a stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary…
And even the mottled, somewhat raggedy witch hazel leaves become a yellow luminescence against the afternoon and its celebration of sky-blue sky. A day to walk, observe, look up, celebrate the riot of color of the so many neighborhood shrubs and trees. A day to rake more fallen browning leaves, to sweep, to wait for the finches and bushtits to arrive for their before dinner dip
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