Writing With Poet Fida Islaih

On Wednesdays at 6:00 pm Poet Fida Islaih facilitates a chat for poets called #PoetteerChat on Twitter. I’ve been participating for a couple of months and have enjoyed chatting and getting to know other poets. Two weeks ago Fida had poet Nicole Gilotta, author of Eat This Poem, as a guest on the chat. (Transcript here.) I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about her book and the inspiration for writing it, so much so that I invited the other participants to join me in writing a collaborative poem about food. I’d always wanted to do a collaborative poem and the subject piqued … Continue reading Writing With Poet Fida Islaih

Women Online: Great Reads You Shouldn’t Miss

I LOVE this tweet by Kelli Agodon, writer and co-founder of Two Sylvias Press who has a great twitter feed. Just had to share. Anyone who writes poetry has had a version of this wonderment in their head at one time or another. But, thing is, if you’re born to write poetry your really don’t have a choice. I wrote when I was very young then didn’t for years and years, only coming back to it in my mid-30’s but it was always in my head. Fragments, bits and pieces, phrases….it was always in there because it’s just how I … Continue reading Women Online: Great Reads You Shouldn’t Miss

Recent Publications

My poem, “Another Poem About the Moon”, was just published in the new issue of Literary Orphans. Huge thanks to Mike Joyce, Scott Walden, and Peter Marra for allowing my work to grace their pages for the third time. I also want to thank Kaia Pieters, featured artist, for the beautiful photography that accompanies my piece and the others in this issue. Beautiful work, indeed. Earlier this month my poem, “Bring Down the Babies”, was published in the beautiful Mockingheart Review. This journal specializes in publishing poetry and is curated by the wonderful Louisiana poet Clare Martin. If poetry is … Continue reading Recent Publications

They Were All There, Gleaming

Without him, a faint image became clearer. The curtain hanging before my eyes, flat and cold, removed. Over me, the jeweled colors appear brighter than they were. ***** So, I worked my own prompt today, my version of an erasure poem. Erasure poems, to me, are too messy – you know, all that black marker. So I just take a block of text and search for words and phrases  and either underline or write them down as I go. This poem was derived from the following paragraph in The Girl With the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier (Penguin Books, 1999) … Continue reading They Were All There, Gleaming

For Joy

I never expected to make the journey that pulls you toward helplessness and illness and demands you step up. The journey that structures your life around spoon feedings during Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune and whatever else crawls across the tv while you’re coaxing your loved one to eat. It was a journey of patience and perseverance, of constant advocacy for excellence of care, of schedules and massages, hair brushing and body-turning. It was a journey of acceptance for the inevitable but without a thought of giving up. It was a journey I was honored to travel, one in which I … Continue reading For Joy

Another Poem About the Moon

We don’t know shit about the moon, her wants or desires, what she feels when she looks at us across the expanse, so green and blue and teeming with life. And us, like a giant eye looking back, plotting our next invasion. We look up into endlessness and there she is. Patient. Steady. Loyal. We planted a flag  on her and we think that makes her ours. She will never be ours. I remember the night we lay in the bed of your old Chevy truck looking up at her, as still and lonely as a lost dime on the … Continue reading Another Poem About the Moon