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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Friday Afternoon Landscape
The morning started in fog. Then a slow-to-emerge sun began to take over the day so we headed to the happy place that is Cistus Nursery on Sauvie Island a dozen or so miles out of town to look for a few more native licorice ferns—specifically the Polypodium glycyrrhiza ‘Rowdy Creek’ that the Cistus folks found growing on a stony cliff in the Redwood Belt right on the Curry County/Del Norte County line of Oregon/California. I have two already and they are thriving in our front yard shady garden…
Celebrating This Website’s China Anniversary
It boggles the mind, my mind, that it has been twenty years! since I first launched this website, www.nancyflynn.com, with the graphic design wizardry of my dear friend, Cynthia Frazier-Rogers. In 2004—when W. Bush was the President, when we were mired in that tragic folly of the Iraq war, when I was still in my freaking forties!—I remember regularly monitoring the ICANN domain name registry. I was waiting to pounce on and (hopefully) reclaim the .com version of my name…
Publication News: “Inventory”
Sometime a poem can emerge from something as mundane as the cleaning out of a cluttered desk drawer. Cataloguing the objects found, remembering the reason why (if any) a particular item—a ticket stub, a stray button, a silver-dollar coin from the 1890s—got stashed away, somehow deserving to be saved. How to then build a poem from a group of seemingly unrelated objects? What through-line could work to ties such disparities together into a kind of whole?…
Silent Morning, Unbuttoned Thoughts Rattling Around
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: 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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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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