Something to crow about and then some. My short poem, “At Harriet Tubman’s Grave in Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York” is appearing in the print issue of Fence 42, Winter 2025—in the mail soon!…
All That Remains in the Light
Spring with all of its blooming and blossoming is a good time of year to learn how to see the world anew again. About a month ago, I had cataracts removed from both of my eyes. Since then, I not only have extraordinary distance vision for the first time almost sixty years but the world seems somehow brighter than ever. Throughout the day, I find myself startled…
Blank Verse: Old-Fashioned Yet Modern
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. An iamb is a metrical foot consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable. Pentameter means there are five of those in a line. You most likely known the sound of blank verse and don’t even know it. Recognize this?
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun…
“We don’t want your Nazi cars / take a one-way trip to Mars.”
This bro/ligarch is definitely un-liked. A thousand people (maybe more) were calling out his evildoing and enabling down on South Macadam Avenue across from the Tesla dealership today. We joined them earlier and it was, overall, definitely cathartic…
Keep on reading in the free (for now) world…
Tonight, I am finishing up a novel called Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey. Harvey won the latest Booker Prize for her excellent slim novel, Orbital. Last week I read a superb non-fiction book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson; it shed new, compelling light on the 1955 lynching of the young Emmett Till…
We Can Still Have (Some) Nice Things
Today was my first visit to the recently remodeled, newly reopened North Portland branch of the Multnomah County Library to return books I had finished reading, to pick up new ones waiting for me on the hold shelf. North Portland Library began as the North Albina Reading Room in 1909. The Jacobethan-style library was built in 1913 and renovated in 1999. The building closed in April 2023 for construction which included additional space to accommodate a new Black Cultural Center, updated technology, and new artwork…
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…
Published but Uncollected: “My Bikini Goes to Goodwill”
I was when fifty-four years old when I wrote this free-verse sorta/kinda sexy love poem, “My Bikini Goes to Goodwill.” I remember the day I was cleaning out closets and drawers to fill a box I would later drop off at the Corvallis Goodwill store. That was when I found the forgotten and quite skimpy, two-piece bikini…
Metaphor? The Battle of Algiers
I have been watching, for the first time, the film, The Battle of Algiers. Palme d’Or and vintage 1966. I started my viewing the night …
The Last Bouquet
I picked the last batch of dahlias on November 22nd, seventeen days after the disastrous, shameful results in the U.S. presidential election. It had been a relatively warm fall overall and the dahlias just kept on blooming right up until the day when it was time to cut down the stalks, cover the beds with thick plastic, shovel then rake a thick layer of bark mulch on top—their over-wintering insulation so I did not have to dig up all the tubers and put them into crates full of peat moss and newspaper for storage…
