Sometimes the questions get asked and asked and never find answers. Sometimes, time does its magical work and makes the asking of the questions less than urgent, even relevant. What is below was written a good while back. I would like to think I have made peace since then with some of this angst and churn. And age fifty now begins to seem like a long time (nearly two decades!) ago…
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Publication News: “These Miles to My River”
I am drawn to bodies of water, particularly rivers and streams. I love to walk along them and stare at their rapids and ripplings, cross them on bridges, and study the way they change through the seasons with rainfall, snowmelt, or drought. One of the longer versions of my preferred author bio attempts to spell out why…
Piecework
Day after Thanksgiving. Last two, three days of November. A very long, distressing month in which time has sorta kinda stood still and also been molasses and also been a Mata Hari of disguise and calumny and intrigue. And yet we all (still) attempt to soldier on. I, for one, decided to get a holiday tree early and spend my Black Friday adorning it with birds, bees, butterflies, dragonflies, cranberry, popcorn, you name it and call it a pollinator habitat because that is the intent
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Publication News: Passager
My narrative poem about my great-grandmother, Charity Schaeffer Lamoureaux, was published in print in Passager a long, long time ag0—yikes, a dozen years past, in Spring 2012. Per their website, Passager (passage + passenger) is “a small, independent literary press whose mission is to publish the work of older writers, encourage the imagination in the later stages of life, and create beautiful and welcoming publications. Passager was born in Baltimore in 1990…
Choosing Beauty…
these bleak, dispiriting days since the events of November 5, 2024. Here is the penultimate bouquet from my front yard dahlia farm. One week from today, this year’s deconstruction begins: cutting down the stalks, laying out the plastic to cover the plants, then bark mulch on top of that to (hopefully) keep the tubers from freezing over the wet, winter months…
Publication News: Ghost Town Poetry 20th Anniversary Anthology, Volume 3
To celebrate twenty years of the Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in November 2024, Printed Matter Vancouver and Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic co-hosts Christopher Luna, Toni Lumbrazo Luna, and Morgan Paige have collected poems from ones read by Ghost Town readers over the years for their third anthology
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Wishing Tree
I suppose I have to start walking with a camera. I see all kinds of arty, interesting, kooky, surprising things whenever I walk around our neighborhood. I was coming down Emerson, the dirt-road-in-the-city blocks and had just returned to asphalt. There on the corner between NE 29th and NE 30th sat a small tin bucket filled with narrow fabric straps…
Making It to Semi-Finalist: “Your Going Away Party at the Hotel Dread”
When I first returned to writing poetry, way back in 2005 and 2006, I took a series of classes through an organization called Writers on the Net. I was incredibly lucky to stumble on an outstanding teacher, Bob Haynes and his courses, Daydreams I and Daydreams II…
Publication News: “Lamentation: A Cento”
My poem, “Lamentation: A Cento,” has been published in Issue #14 of The Poeming Pigeon: A Journal of Poetry and Art. After ten years, this will be the final issue. I wrote this poem as part of a cento-centric project during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic
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Cursive Handwriting to Quell 24/7 Anxiety…
I am writing by hand now every day. Have been since the middle of August, my mad money spent on postcard stamps. Pick up the pen, find the message that goes on the card I am scrawling for a voter in a state that is not this one, and get to work
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