November 2024
Bio Note: Since beginning to write in 2008, my work has appeared in journals such as Amethyst Review and Braided Way. In 2020 I received an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the resulting collection, Between the Rows, debuted in 2022. My current writing project involves reinvestigating genealogical information I unearthed in the pre-computer 1980s. I have retired after 37 years of teaching and find a bounty of inspiration in my family, my rural home and writing communities like Verse-Virtual.
Teeter
Geometry
can explain
many things.
But what about
a Tinkertoy day
that stands cockeyed,
sides and angles
neither equal nor
proportional,
making it hard
to ambulate
impossible to
be hugged?
The Treasury of Lost Things
We’ve all wondered where the missing
sock ended up, the blue plaid
puzzle piece, a back door key,
the orange-handled garden shears.
Is there a dusty cellar
where the summer scent
of jasmine is tucked,
last winter’s blizzard winds,
the goldfinches’ dazzling
summer plumage?
Could the bottled pleasure
of firefly hunting perch
precarious on some sagging shelf?
And in the vast vaults of this treasury
of lost things, might I uncover
Eva Elisabeth’s maiden name,
the date Johanna and her mother set sail,
pages from just one ancestor’s diary,
the sanded sheen of Lorenz’s finest wheel,
or even a saddlebag smelling of sweat
and leather from Cavalry Unit I?
And would I know it if I stumbled
over a simple pouch that opens, sounding
the catch in Mary’s eight-year-old
throat at first sight of New York
harbor’s Castle Garden?
Starting in Darkness
When I walk next door in the ponderous
weight of darkness, I feel I am walking
through the time before language
powered thought, when the only words
were names of things you could see
or smell. As light steals stars’ backdrop
I feel the comfort of language’s purring
prowess that can now beget words
beyond still-life portraits, promise
sentences that span synapses and sway
with the intrinsic energy of subtlety.
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