My cento, “On Not Looking Away,” is appearing in the print issue of Fence 42, Winter 2025 and on their website, here: On Not Looking …
“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…
Publication in Fence, Winter 2025
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!…
Buy Nothing Day
Today no money changed hands as far as I was concerned. I did not drive. I did not order anything online. I did not even patronize local businesses—that was yesterday. What did I do? Wash clothes using laundry detergent purchased many moons ago. Activated the big-gun leaf blower we inherited from my son to begin the annual ritual spring cleaning up of the mess that is our outside universe here in Western Oregon…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Get Your 25-cent Poetry Here…
There is a very cool coffeehouse called The Stacks two miles from our house down Killingsworth Street. It not only serves coffee and breakfast burritos but is also a very cool community library. I met friends at The Stacks for coffee and conversation a few days ago. All around us sat (mostly) silent people with their varied incarnations of coffee drinks. Nearly all were either wearing headphones or staring into one screen or another
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