This was a week all about the sun. One way or another, millions of inhabitants on this geographic outpost of Planet Earth looked up, grew …
Poems Can Also Be Short!
My husband and I are avid gardeners. Every year, our community garden plot near the Woodlawn Elementary School is 400 square feet of asparagus, beets, carrots, delicata squash, leeks, peas, peppers, pole beans, potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, green and yellow wax bush beans, and some years even zucchini. Often we grow heirloom varieties…
Preparing To Be Dazzled…
We are still a week away from the official vernal equinox, when the sun crosses the celestial equator making its way to the north. I just learned from a Duck Duck Go search that spring arrives a half-day or so earlier than usual because 2024 is a leap year. It will be dark when it finally hits, just after eight p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Unlike today, the first bright one after what felt like a forever of gray and cold and windy and wet Pacific Northwest days. Walking around, celebrating an afternoon of sun, the streets are muddy, littered with fallen branches, matted leaves along the curbs and in the storm drains—the detritus of a winter that had its moments of harsh and formidable patches, that ground me, for one, down, made me want to hide inside with book after library book…
Publication News: riverbabble 28
Over the years, a number of my poems were featured at riverbabble, a literary journal that unfortunately is no longer online. riverbabble was founded in Berkeley, California in 2002 by Pandemonium Press and published twice a year—once in June, the Bloom’s Day Issue, and once in January, the Winter Solstice Issue. Every month, the Press also curated a reading series at the Spice Monkey Restaurant in Oakland, California…
Publication News: “Bringing in the Seeds”
In August 2012, the “Women Writing Nature” issue of Sugar Mule published not one but four! of my poems: “Bringing in the Seeds”; “Keep Napa Glassy-Winged Sharpshooter Free!”; “On the Rare Occasion of an Ice Storm in the Coast Range”; and my prose poem, “Empty Nest.” They made a PDF of this triple issue so you can download then read them all as well as the work by all the other amazing women who contributed…
Metaphor for This Past Ice-Bound Week?
An heirloom narcissus that, strangely, insisted on blooming starting back in December and is now slayed and then some by our recent ice-ocalypse. Which still refuses to thaw as temperatures hover (barely) above 32 degrees Fahrenheit…
Upon the Return/Slice of Heaven
I wake to rain. I am on my hands and worthless knees. I pry and pare back twinflower leaves, free the groundcovers: kinnick-kinnick, thimbleberry, and native wintergreen. Dig and prune. Command the dahlias to grow aligned with their bamboo stakes. My fingernails are crescents of dirt. All I care is to breathe, hidden beneath the reach and lean of these tall, tall western Oregon trees. Last night in the rain, the emperor gong rang…
End of the Season…
There is a spectacularly bright full moon out there on this chilly, late November night. Yesterday, I cut the final dahlias blooms of the season. They were looking a little ragged after a few nights of just-around-freezing temperatures and cold wind. Then I tackled the plants with my new, awesome Felco secateurs—they made swift work of stems and stalks
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The Last Bouquet?
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…
Leave the Leaves
Our garden helper, Phil, was here today, pruning the vine maples, the Japanese maples, the witch hazel, the redbud
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