Check out my Substack newsletter, Poetry & Life: Notes of an Old Lesbian, for weekly essays and news. I’ll continue to maintain this website, but it will not be updated as often as my Substack.
The Sisters’ Journey & Prophecy
Thank you, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg for choosing my poems The Sisters’ Journey and Prophecy for The Coop. I am thrilled and honored for these to be my 4th and 5th poems published in this marvelous venue.
What the Mind Thinks It Cannot Have
It was so lovely to wake up this morning and see my new poem published by MockingHeart Review. I love this journal! This issue has a great group of poets and features my friend and teacher, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. Join us!
What the Mind Thinks it Cannot Have
We who were born on earth
so hard-cracked dry
our bodies shrink
from each other, how
can we believe in rain?
Me, Defined makes its debut. Thanks Lavender Review!
I am so pleased to that The Lavender Review. has published my new poem. What a marvelous issue.
Many Thanks to The Coop!
I am honored that The Coop: The Poetry Collective has once again published my work. Here’s the latest:
The Art of the Old Lesbian
Is to slide down the slope of a woman’s body where everytime her tongue tastes skin she splits apart somebody’s
wall of rules.
She’s practiced at slamming a sledge hammer into the
concrete that presses down with the heft of millions of
mouths chanting sin-sin-sin.
more
Thank You, MockingHeart Review!
Should You Choose to Accept,
Your Mission is to Find Joy
At the bottom of this slot
buried so deep between
buildings you want to
crawl away in fear,
be human. Raise
your head. Listen.
(read the rest)
The Absent Poet Returns
Life has been full and joyful, but oh my, I have failed to tend this website. A thousand apologies! Shall I make it up to you with a poem? Want to go to the mountains? I wrote this while sitting on a cabin porch in southwestern Colorado.
In the Sangre de Cristo Mountains
High up rocking on a cabin porch
perched on top of a ridge.
Black clouds bubble. Booms rumble.
The whole mess surges at me.
A hummingbird feeder dangles
from the roof. Oscillates wildly.
I should go inside, but I keep
rocking, hat tied under my chin,
brim flapped up at attention,
temperature dropping, I grin.
lean forward, intently watching
a dozen tiny birds thrumming.
Torpedo thin. Darting in and out.
Hovering. Unshakeable in the wind.
A Grand Time
We had a grand time this Saturday at the first-ever virtual Lawrence Poetry Fair. Originally scheduled as an in-person event in April, we moved the fair online for obvious reasons. Even though making it virtual meant that we had to miss the milling about joy of in-person conversations before and after the readings, holding the fair online meant that we were able to draw three Kansas poets laureate, including Denise Low who now lives in California. I was honored to act as emcee, and my reading comes a hair after 46 minutes into the event, but stay and watch the entire video. We had an amazing lineup including one of my favorite poets of all time, Annette Billings.
I am a poet
I feel the pressure of words, anxious to break free—to fling themselves at ancient walls, to chisel, nibble, batter, and shatter all the old understandings. I feel the desperation of words to settle—to become drops of rain pattering on railings, become the smell of a freshwater sea, and after resting a bit, to take flight on fingered-wings.
My journey to becoming a poet has been a stop-start, stumble this way and stagger that way oddity. When I was a kid I believed poetry was a broken, obsolete art characterized by pomposity, stupidity, and incomprehensible language. When I came out as a lesbian at age 28, and another lesbian introduced me to our great foremother Sappho, I discovered that not only her work, but also the work of poets like Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Broumas could move me in ways that no novel, no movie, no song had ever done.
I began writing poetry then. I had some immediate success, and then abruptly, I stopped. The words that dripped off my fingers scared me. I was frightened by what I was learning about myself, and by the power of what I realized I could do. That was 40 years ago.
Two years ago, the pressure of words became too great to resist anymore, and again I took up the poet’s pen. Much to my surprise, I discovered what my young self couldn’t understand: Poetry can save us. I can’t explain it any better than Olga Broumas does in her amazing poem, Artemis. Here are her last lines:
like amnesiacs
in
a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.