• Poetry & Other Writing

    Relax

    Relax by Ellen Bass Bad things are going to happen. Your tomatoes will grow a fungus and your cat will get run over. Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream melting in the car and throw your blue cashmere sweater in the drier. Your husband will sleep with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling out of her blouse. Or your wife will remember she’s a lesbian and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat– the one you never really liked–will contract a disease that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth every four hours. Your parents will die. No matter how many…

  • Poetry & Other Writing

    Poetry Month

    Into My Private Silence // Adrienne Asher Into my private silence I throw crows and branches, moon’s rising, bleached summer hills. There is a reason some say she’s a poet; it’s not what you think. At the center of all things is a spark. Brief and bright, it starts the song, moves the dance, unfurls words, splashes color. Its quick whisper shimmers just below the surface, sudden as a raven’s laugh, swift as an overflowing stream. Understand, I do not catch it, lucky even if I catch a glimpse. But still, she is my elusive muse: the glimmer at the heart of life.

  • Poetry & Other Writing

    #AWP19

    At the 2019 Association of Writers Conference at an offsite poetry reading with Bruce Beasley and Suzanne Paola at Taste wine bar in Portland, Oregon. GREAT reading. GREAT conference: inspiring, exhausting, 4-day marathon of 15,000 people converging on Portland and celebrating the written word.

  • Poetry & Other Writing

    Burning Through Dreams, published by The Laurel Review

    Burning Through Dreams Curved around my dreaming I dive deeper. Your image morphs into a candle flame wavering before me. Streets curve and reform under strange skies. Oceans surge and tower, falling. Lifted by the night’s tsunami, I awake with dreams lying tangled in my hair, the taste of the moon in my mouth. Your memory lies flashing like animal eyes in the dark.

  • Poetry & Other Writing

    Rest in peace—W.S. Merwin

    Rest in peace—W.S. Merwin, the American poet, environmental activist, and two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient, died Friday March 15 at his home in Haiku, Hawaii, on the island of Maui. He was 91.   Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me And the silence will set out Tireless traveler Like the beam of a lightless star Then I will no longer Find myself in life as in a strange garment Surprised at the earth And the love of one woman And the shamelessness of men As today writing after three days of rain Hearing the wren sing and the falling…

  • Poetry & Other Writing

    The Poet’s Life

    More polite rejections. More self-doubt. On the other hand, I’ve submitted to seven new journals and put x-amount of submissions on my calendar so that regardless of the blues I keep kicking things out the door. #stubborn #counterphobic

  • Poetry & Other Writing

    Blackbirds

    Blackbirds — by Susan Mitchell Because it is windy, a woman finds her clothesline bare, and without rancor unpins the light, folding it into her basket. The light is still wet. So she irons it. The iron hisses and hums. It knows how to make the best of things. The woman’s hands smell clean. When she shakes them out, they are voluminous, white. All night my hands weep in gratitude for the little things. That feet are not shoes. That blackbirds are eating the raspberries. That parsley does not taste like bread. From now on I want to live only by grace. In other words, not to deserve things. Without…

  • Art & Design Projects,  Poetry & Other Writing

    Mandombé

    Fascinating! Mandombe or Mandombé is a script proposed in 1978 in Mbanza-Ngungu in the Bas-Congo province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Wabeladio Payi, who related that it was revealed to him in a dream by Simon Kimbangu, the prophet of the Kimbanguist Church. Mandombe is based on the sacred shapes and , and intended for writing African languages such as the four national languages of the Congo, Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba and Swahili, though it does not have enough vowels to write Lingala fully. It is taught in Kimbanguist church schools in Angola, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also…