Chicago Musings on the L

I do not fear you, brother bee.
We are the same, you and I:
We have in us one good sting
To deal before we die.

Online Hide & Seek

The above's the 1st round in my collage journal; it got edited down to the poem below:

Digital comes forth
to organize your life
into facebook - traces
of journeys, neon blurs
smeared on your path.

A forgettable past,
and the way it was
lost and found.

Sneak Attack

(Trying this whole Instagram thing out since my vibrant, hip niece and nephew hooked me up with an account.)

Blue Moon

the blue moon from my house last night

It’s the beginning:

a blue moon, blazing.
bright arms striking out
Black. Light, inverted
smoke wafting down
to my skin like ash. Alone,
waiting for the clock to strike
her witching hour.
Is she ready? Flushed, husky,
lust-filled for magic? This
primal drive invades my iris
rings. Binding, finding myself facing
the Dark from within. She sings.

Once, in a blue moon,
this is how it ends.

“Philologia: Such is this gift, that bites as it gives”

Each word, a name. A gift
to bind together and draw apart,
granted from a settled throne
crafted of collected expressions,
Sovereign.

The queen’s a veil of incense between slate
and stars, whispering her dreams. Sometimes,
she howls, sometimes, she sings.

I cannot see the king, but his decrees
dictate this castle of universe, the etiquette of
interaction, court.

There is
comfort in them woven,
absence in their wake:
my king, the symbols,
my queen, their meanings,
together sweep us through (systemic
spells of aid and debt.)

Royal favors, words, and royal angers, too:
waves of welcome, banishment
twined atop the Omniscient
Word-King’s Scepter,
one dip weighing us all
like a scale with a feather.
One flick cremates, the other embalms,
both stuff our casings with meaning.

What tax must we pay for such privilege?

Beware their lexi-cons, precarious declarations
possessing us all. We drown, word filled or
word less. We drown and we find
our names are carved on the dotted lines
along the bottom of the settled throne.



-for Real Toads’ Get Listed – July, you have to use 3 of the following words: taxman, heat, prison, fear, mail, inevitable, premise, sovereign, system, advice, beware, & kept.

I think I used 2-and-2-halves of these words: sovereign, beware, system(ic), & tax (which is half of “taxman”).

This poem actually started as a reflection on several Real Toads’ Tuesday Challenge poems (Susie Clevenger's "Crumpled Scent" and Crayfish's "Over Tea - TB"), combined with a quote from Maria Popova over at Brain Pickings: “To name a thing is to acknowledge its existence as separate from everything else that has a name; to confer upon it the dignity of autonomy while at the same time affirming its belonging with the rest of the namable world; to transform its strangeness into familiarity, which is the root of empathy. To name is to pay attention; to name is to love.”

The painting is one of my earlier abstracts. I think it looks a little like an imploring dolphin, surrounded by an overwhelming world. Fittingly, it's drowned under layers and layers of other paint, becoming a (hidden) palimpsest.

Rose Window, Notre Dame de Paris

images via wikimedia - click for wikimedia page

Paris.
I was there.
The rain-sleeked
streets never dried,
staining the city steel.

(When the rain silvered more,
you could have taken it for
Granite. Glinting in the street lamps,
glittering through the fogged
net where cigarette smoke
settles to socialize and sense
the dull sharpening of the world.)

I loved steel.
I loved the streets,
small dog shits and all.
I loved fumbling through
Desolees and Parlez-vous Anglais?
I really loved the way the
lined, lean men gobbled me up
with famished eyes. Nobody owned me;
I braced, I softened.
Brazened.

The rose window of Notre Dame
watched me come and go. Watched the men,
the dogs, the rain, the streets, blanketing us
with shards of appraisal. Rainbows.
They gave me the creeps. Guilt, or something.
I hid from her, sliding round the curves
of the beetle-green Metra pole,
down into the absinthe hole,
I hid from her, my Rose. I hid from her in Paris,
from her glances there, from all shades of them.
Green.

Later, I would find salvation jaune at
Notre Dame de la Garde. But that is an
otro conversation, altogether, one for
the sun-burnt squeaky café tables
tucked round the docks in Marseilles,
between the abandon of Paris and the peacocks of Barcelona.

Stick to the story – C’est la vie.



Inspired by Phoenix Rising Poetry Guild's prompt and my own trip(s) to Paris.

Wee Things: Dueling Poem and Wuthering Heights Mini-Book

“Intellect vs. Art: The Duel”

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” -Charles Bukowski

Does each have a sword, then?
The eye of the mind, the claws
of the heart?

Sometimes, the brain is a shield,
only (.) fiery hearts assault.

(jotted down today and passed along to Real Toads' Tuesday Platform)




Wee Wuthering

“I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart: but really with it, and in it.” -Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

I have been obsessed with miniature things for a long time. As a kid, I'd pass the time making paper Polly Pocket-like structures with characters from my favorite books. Fairy (or dollhouse, I suppose) sized books particularly captured my imagination and still do. I've been watching a ton of them, especially from this shop on etsy. Since I really, really wanted to buy some but have no job and thus am pretty much broke, I decided to make one, purely for myself, with no intent to sell.

I found a few different tutorials, but this one was my favorite. (Just like with recipes, I draw inspiration but never follow directions. Good thing, cuz that tutorial's in Russian.) After glancing at 'em, I shrugged and surveyed my art corner. I had cardstock and glue and a printer... everything I needed. Then I searched Online for Wuthering Heights covers, picking a Fritz Eichenberg cover. I used some of my favorite quotes. I also found various images Online that were fitting, including some Kate Bush stuff and some The Gaslight Anthem lyrics that capture Wuthering Heights so well. All images in my book come from others; none are mine. If I were to make any mini-books to share in full with the blogosphere or to sell, I would use only my own images.

Here's the start of the project:


Anywho, after cutting the pieces to size, I added details like gold leafing the pages and adding textured lines to the spine:


Here she is!




I'm happy enough with the results that I'm contemplating making a few mini-books out of my own art and poems as table decorations for my wedding... What do you think?

flowers by the chapel by the sea

Thanks to Rock Rose - this image was taken by her, and captures what I imagine the landscape of my poem looks like. Check out her blog and her "Small Plants for the Sunken Garden" post.


My mind is a chapel
carved from rock meeting
tongue of the sea, licking
away the centuries.

The beach is sonorous dips
of prayers sung without words,
gut-uttered, offered to the wind,
the waves, the simple tides of
time. There are worlds within worlds.

From the belltower, I can see
three flowers. Each sings. Each
shines with the seams of Fate’s fickle
threads woven to Transpire.

Emerge the first flower. See?
Hugging the cliff, there to the left,
just beyond the sea spray, the wire fence
to fend off sheep. Look through the lace of
the reeds, there. Yes, focus on the purple head,
poking from beyond the fence, the single flower
in the mist of weeds. She is lovely, is she not?
She is the sharpest, melodramatic saccharine,
as such, she stings. Her name is If
Only. Pluck her, and bleed.

Back to our safe stone, hewn from the cliff, the peace
full place of worship crafted for the sake of sanctity,
sanity. From here, look to the sand path, worn, its border:
skeletal shells, wily bracken, and the pale white flower,
petals like pointed rays of moonlit beams, whispering their
secrets like stars to the far corners of the universe.
Whispers because they haven’t found their voice.
The blossom must look deep, but it is proud and frightened.
Try to pluck, it will recede. Oh, and mind the bees.
Guardians of all that Is.

But there is one other flower this old chapel
sees, one other flower that calls to me. This one is
yellow and big as a bowl, follows the sun, swallows me
whole. She is so bright that she almost blinds, hers is the
flower that captures my dreams. She holds in her petals
the paint of delight, the plan for the future, the Want
to Be, the seductive howl of a new-moon night.

Together, they set my chapel
humming, fan my skin aquiver,
a breeze skimming the smoothest
pool of my neck, my flesh
set aflame even as it freezes,
the pleasure and the pain, weathered
in the crumbling call of the chapel bell.

The world I know
I will only know
the way a child knows a beach:
bucket by bucket, she builds a sandcastle,
then mourns when the wave clears the slate clean.
Propelled by unknown forces, she plucks and leaves
a flower in her wake.



Inspired by and written for Real Toads' Play It Again, Toads #18. I glimpsed at Writing the Inside, Out, but mostly used the pictures of the three flowers for this one. Thanks for the fun prompt!

mother tongue

Inspired by and written for Imaginary Garden with Real Toads' Word Count with Mama Zen.

Here's the poem, by itself:

The worm is the mother tongue,
the origin of Man. The hiss that spits
our enemies, sets our fears aflame. Through fire
we rise, the power of ash in our fists.

This is what we have to give: a hand
with a knife, ill-hid.



And here's the painting, by itself:

The painting was my way of dealing with an insane finals week... I felt as if I were trapped in a burning room watching my own skin sizzle away while just off in a corner, beyond the blinds, was a world that might still be untouched. As with most of my work, it contains some found objects/mixed media elements. The curtain hanger is a chopstick, held in place by a few bolts I found. The window is framed by pieces of rusted metal. The blinds are words I tore out of an old, decrepit, almost unsalvageable book. The twisty device and the frame are tea packets, and a small mushroom bead acts as the pully thing. I then painted over it with the frenetic madness of a hummingbird on crack. (& I kinda like the results!)

Original Omen: Familiar Estuary

There is a Nowhere,
the meeting of the wet trickle of the rainbow line
of our stream and the north fork of
Massie’s Creek, the beat of the water rushing
against itself. Nothing escapes the Scylla
of self entrapment, backwatered estuary.

While not the sea, Massie’s Creek is
bigger, faster, fuller, less slicked
with neon-hued oils from the roots of
clicking gangly reeds. The stream,
though, is less touched by Man. Clear, cold.
From the fields past the Creek, the pipes
poke up, spew currents of planting and reaping.
The Creek is deer-scat
colored sludge, the stream
is the mist of a waking dream.

In the dips where they dare
to meet, watch how they
change… without changing at all.
Welcome to Nowhere,
original omen,
the crash before
the desperate fall.



-for Real Toads' Tuesday Platform

How 6 months went by: a poem, a note, and a personal elucidation

A Poem

“From the Beyond”

A year sliced in half, with the six months askew:
days spanning many suns and spilling into many moons.
Weeks like hours and months like moments, waves consume,
Retreat, return; sand dripping and creeping
Until the glorious night soothes. Beneath the calming
Dark, the crickets chirp, the fireflies blink,
The ones and zeros lie asleep, the wires tripped
Over themselves, a clear free path revealed,
At risk of being overgrown.



A Note

Greetings, friends of the blogosphere,

It’s been awhile, eh?

In the last six months, I didn't really exist. Well, I did, but it didn't feel like me, really. It felt like a big robot brain, Face of Boe style. There was grad school, teaching, volunteering, student leadership, state lobbying, job applications, dissertation proposal writing, conferences, and many little trials and triumphs. It was a time my heart felt overly full and I knew I was where I needed to be, but I am happy to move on to the next phase in my life – writing and defending my dissertation.

What’s my dissertation? You ask.

Called “The Squall of the Wind Farms,” it’s an exploration of the policies and clashes among entrepreneurs, politicians, and various community interests in the development of wind farms. Nerdy, but I love it.

I did not have my dissertation in mind when I created this blog, but I delight that its title (Through the Wind Winding) so accurately captures the dissertation process. I feel a little like a ribbon that’s been blown around for months, finally caught in a tree, waving limply as the sun sets in a bright burst.

Cheers,
Dianne


A Personal Elucidation

Someone asked me why I don’t post about politics on Facebook or my blog. (After all, I am a political science doctoral student.) My choice not to post my political opinions here stems from a few interconnected reasons.

1. The older I get, the more I see values and pitfalls, benefits and detriments, from multiple perspectives, and the less sure I am about my own opinions.

2. In each of my various professional roles as teacher, academic, journalist, and political scientist, I deal in the presentation of facts and perceptions. These are just as variable as opinions. Show me a study with one result, and I will dig up another study with a contrary result. Methodology is only part of these differences; we all want to be heard so badly that we speak past each other, asserting others are wrong before we try to understand how their perspectives actually compare to our own.

3. In a world where so many voices seem to shout, I genuinely want to listen. I want to know what each person means by the words they use. Political differences seem slightly less insurmountable when we peel back emotional rhetoric to look at substance: who, what, when, where, why, and how.

4. Every single person has something to teach me, and it’s not my place to shout over these potential learning opportunities. You won’t see me posting much about police brutality, race, or the 2016 election campaigns, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. I care very deeply, which is why I spend so much time pushing these issues from multiple angles, particularly in the classroom. (Boy, am I excited to teach American Politics this fall!)

5. Finally, everyone needs an outlet. I love my job and my field, but I also love literature and poetry and silly pictures of cats and dogs… I use social media to fill these gaps. Politics is present in almost every aspect of my daily, face-to-face life; it is, after all, my career. I relish having a tiny little corner free of it.

First and Last Darkness

The light dims, a cigarette
end ground into glossy old-glass,
Navy ashtray of sky –
stars caught popping, air bubbles
racing from
long dimmed
creation fires.

This moment is a relic,
a museum hum
drum, passed by with a
shrug; visitors
crave electric.

What’s an old sunset
gathering dust?

As if from ghostly measure,
then, the tray is rocked
and balance hung -

Slow shattering, like tinkling water
rushed, screaming
steroided out on megaphones.
The noise wakens the eyes,
first and last awareness:

Darkness.


Posted for Real Toads' Open Link Monday.

Happy news!
I am ridiculously excited that a short story from my Welsh ghost/archaeological novel was chosen as a runner up in the AmeriCymru - West Coast Eisteddfod! Congrats to winner Sally Spedding for "The Fold," an eerie story of rural Welsh life that left me with goose bumps. Kudos to all entrants; the competition was fierce, engaging, and filled with talent. Thanks especially to judge Mike Jenkins (a writer I've long admired) and to Americymru's Ceri Shaw. Diolch!

"What Shadows Follow the Souls of Men?"

Where you walk,
you stretch behind yourself,
shrinking from the light.

When you walk into the light,
you leave some of yourself
behind. What part is that?

Is it your doubts about
moments being connected,
a life of pictures
instead of films?

Will your breath
pull through?

Your need to fidget,
avoid silence?

The way you picture
your own shape and
measure it against
the puzzle you make
of the world?

The way the images
flame,
leaving dark snow.
Even that blows away.


-

Hello, all. Merry meet again. How have 20 days gone by since my last post? Well, it was dissertation proposal crunch time, end of semester grading, holiday traveling among Illinois, Ohio, and Virginia... and some minor crises to deal with. All of these things have been excellent fodder for writing, so keep checking back. I hope your 2014 has been inspiring and enriching, complete with holidays packed with good cheer and company. Stay warm and safe, friends!

Bad Vibes & Things Discarded: 55 Worded Works

A Series of 55-Word Shorts & A Poem for Real Toad's Flash - 55 word challenge.


“Other Worlds”

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

You should, I think, watching you roll your thumbs on the joysticks and your Barbarian character simultaneously turn a corner in the dwarf-hewn cave. From the deep, a fiery balrog tears out of the earth, shaking your controller. You drop it.

In your shriek, the virtual becomes real.


-

“Experimentation”

Vibrations aren’t always good, she frowned, regretting answering the buzzing phone. She returned to the white linened table, heels clicking on the wood floor, and proffered an apology to her date on the way out, “Gotta go clean up a mess at the lab.” She felt a flash of guilt, but, hey, Bloody rampages qualify.

-

“Cosmic Mockery”

Vibrations aren’t always good, she frowned, immediately regretting answering the buzzing phone. It was her bank: someone had stolen her credit card. They’d bought $1,000 of baby items: diapers, food, and a crib. She sank to the ground, breath catching in her throat, next to the trash can that still held the pregnancy test, negative.

-

“Resonance”

Red balloon stretches thin -
pinprick, needle-scar puncture.
air escapes slowly, roundness
retains through shrinking
till shriveled it gives up.

In the trash, it meets discarded
apple core, once round and red, too,
now thin, bowed from depletion of
seeds and apple-meat.

Whether one lost
more than the other
they both ended up
the same.

"Llansgi Roots" - West Coast Eisteddfod Competition Submission

(I may have been curiously absent from the blogosphere this month, but for good reason: many writing competition deadlines approach. I've had some pretty crazy coincidences involving one of my favorite annual competitions, hosted by Americymru, which perhaps I shall tell some other day.

This post is a teaser, just the beginning of one of my short stories, "Llansgi Roots." The full story is part of a novel I've been writing since 2008, when several trips to Tintern sparked a trio of interwoven stories. I hope you enjoy this excerpt.)



Llansgi, Wales, 2014
Her bones revealed she was 15 to 19 years old when she died of starvation, and they indicated that she had given birth. Her clothes had turned to dust hundreds of years ago; the archaeologist vowed it was a miracle the bones had been preserved at all, let alone so well. The speculation was that the shed had collapsed, buried her, and acted as a tomb, keeping air and sunlight out. There was sand – sand – on the ground under the skeleton; it must have been gathered elsewhere and stored in the shed. The sand’s presence could be the key, the archaeologist thought, to the skeleton surviving despite time and fate conspiring against her. How wondrous. This perfectly preserved skeleton, if contemporary to the metal jewelry and pottery in the shed with her, was at least 600 years old.

Llansgi, Wales, Late 1400s
She is a stranger. Everyone knows, of course, because everyone has known everyone else their whole lives. Not her; her face is new. She appeared in the village about three months back, in the middle of winter.

She stays in a barn on the edge of the village in exchange for milking the cows. She is skinny, and her clothes are little more than abbey rags. She spurns the advances of the men who proposition her, yet she doesn’t seek a husband. No one knows where she came from, who her family is, or what brought her here. She’s never been seen near the church. The only thing she is ever seen doing is walking.

She walks alone. She walks into the woods surrounding the village, avoiding the road. She collects herbs and flora, offering them to her farmer landlord for part of her rent, who sells them at market for a profit.

Word is that she is only ever seen walking to and from the abbey a few miles away. The village wives swear she is the consort of the fat monk in charge of the food stores. Their husbands reply, “Then she should have more meat on her bones,” which silences the gossip for a few hours.

She’s a stranger, which means that she will always be the focus of speculation.

But I know she doesn’t go to the abbey for rotund Brother Aurelio.

I found her, one day in the snow-swamped forest, before she had gone into the town, before the gossip had started. She was kneeling on the ground, hunched over some twisted root, digging it up. I cleared my throat from a few feet away, and she sort of rolled over, looking up at me.

“Hello,” she said.

“Are you alone?” I asked.

“Do your eyes generally work?”

I looked down at her sitting form, puzzled. “Yes.”

“Then it would appear that I am, no?”

“Do you always talk like this?”

“Only when I’m alone.”

“You’re not from here,” I said.

“You are,” she replied.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

She held up a twisted looking twig. “This root, when ground into a pulp, can help heal even the worst cuts and wounds.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I read it in a book.”

I laughed. There’s no way on God’s green earth that she could read. Only monks can read. Monks and nobles. It’s practically forbidden for anyone else.

She stood up, turned away from me, and started down the deer path toward the abbey. I picked up a root she had dropped. It smelled like damp earth and decay. I flicked it off into the woods.

Later that week, my poaching cousin got skewered by his antlered prey in the woods and the wound turned red and purple and started spewing pus. I went to the abbey and the monks directed me to a lay brother, Bernard, who tends the herb gardens and orchard near the woods. He has only been at this abbey for a few years, but his medicinal knowledge is already respected even by the book-learned monks. When I sought his expertise for my cousin, he spoke little, which was to be expected as the abbey folk are known for their reticence. He ground something into a paste he then handed to me. It smelled of earth and decay, the same rotten root the girl was gathering in the woods.

About a week after that, when I was poaching small game for my cousin’s family during his recovery, in the distance I saw Bernard and the mystery woman. He looked around hurriedly before handing her a thin object. She unrolled it, a scroll, and appeared to scan it. Her lips moved as she appeared to tell him what it contained. When she saw me, she didn’t even try to put it away. Bernard spoke more words then than I’d ever heard him speak.

“Please, she’s all I have. I need her.”

He explained that the monks thought Bernard could read and were slipping him scrolls and requests for tinctures and potions. Only, he couldn’t read. He was just a lay brother good with plants. However, his lord brother’s daughter could read, and his brother’s whole estate had been toppled in a skirmish last year. His niece alone had escaped alive and come here. He knew she couldn’t stay in the abbey forever, but he needed more time to figure things out.

I didn’t say a word, and shortly after that, she moved into the barn at the edge of the village near my own family’s land.

Months have passed since my mysterious neighbor moved in. Spring pokes out late this year, weak, cold, and dry. The farmers fret that conditions are horrible for crops. Food is scarce. Even poachers, like my cousin, can’t find game. The girl’s forest gatherings make up more and more of locals’ diets. No stew can be found without her herbs. I leave my own garden for a few hours every day to help her. She shows me what to look for in the wild, cues like minute color variations in berries that render one edible and one poisonous.

She rarely speaks, but when she does, she says too much, revealing knowledge she should not have. When she gives her finds to the farmer, she tells him too much about what the plants can be paired with and what their healing effects might be.

The other locals are growing suspicious. Could she be the cause of the cold weather, the lack of rain? Didn’t she benefit when their crops failed? God’s punishing them for suffering a nonbeliever. She has the nerve to offer them food when she’s denied them their hard-earned crops.

I tell her of these rumors, beg her to join me at church, to marry me. My wife died several years ago, in childbirth, along with our daughter, and though my garden is small, it yields enough to trade for the things I need. She could be comfortable with me. The gossip would die down.

She pauses at what has become our meeting spot in the woods, in front of two saplings reaching out toward each other. We have started training them, guiding their branches, helping them to lean on each other. I reach for her. She leans into me, her back to my stomach, her small shoulders fitting between my arms.

“Do you see these two trees?” she asks. “We are like them. If we become entangled with each other, our fates will be wrapped up in one another. We shall love, but we shall also lack. I will not be able to continue helping my Uncle learn medicine. I could die in childbirth. And you? You would be a pariah.”

“I don’t care,” I say, and I mean it. She kisses me then, loves me, and it is the death of her.

The cold spring turns into a cold summer which gives way to a bitterly cold fall. Snow freezes the few resilient crops before they can be harvested. The entire village relies on the abbey’s stores to survive; well, the abbey stores and the learned girl’s scavenging. She is remarkably adept at gathering herbs and plants regardless of the seasons; her knowledge grows with the scrolls and books Bernard sneaks to her. Along with her knowledge, her belly grows, too. She is swollen with our child.

“Be my wife,” I implore again. She kisses me and shakes her head no. She will belong to no man. She will accept no help with her lot in life. She will always choose her own path.

I find a twisted piece of scrap metal that the blacksmith, an old friend of mine, lets me keep, and I wrap it with twine to give to my lady, a necklace. It looks like a root.

“Because I understand, and I am yours, just the same,” I say. When she turns away and her fingertips brush her eyes, I pretend not to notice, but I am pleased she is so moved.

When her belly gets so big she can’t bend over to gather plants, she accepts my help. She agrees to let me do the gathering, then to meet me at our tree for me to give her the stuff for the farmer and her uncle. We meet in the early afternoon, when wandering eyes are distracted by grumbling bellies. A large almost-black cat has taken to following her around; since it’s killed the mice and rats, she doesn’t complain. I call him “Brother Aurelio,” on account of the cat’s massive size and lazy manner.

The village whispers about the cat, calling it her familiar, claiming its presence is the proof they need: the girl is evil. An enchanter, a lurer of fine Christian men. The townswomen shake their heads at Aurelio, at their husbands, at me, at anyone who gives the herb-gathering stranger the time of day. She seems not to care, continues treading head-on through this harshest of years. Meets me, every day, through fog and ice and thundercloud, at the two little trees bent like one heart into each other.

One afternoon, she doesn’t come. I run to her barn. There is blood on her bed. No sign of her.

I knock on her landlord’s farmhouse door, but there is no answer. I run into the village, where smoke rises from the center square. Screams and shouts pierce the air. Evening descends and more villagers gather, their desperation threading into chaos.

“Seized by the devil, she was!”

“Bride of Satan! The babe’ll have the mark, of course.”

“She’s already sacrificed it! There was no baby when the miller found her convulsing and covered in blood.”

Dear Lord, I think. What have they done with her?

“She’s the reason God froze us out! How could He provide us with bountiful harvests with that snake slithering in the grass?”

“Mrreee!” an unearthly scream pierces through the commotion. Brother Aurelio, the cat. Someone has grabbed him. He wriggles, bites, claws; someone has tied a rope around his neck. I cannot bear to watch. I turn back into the crowd, searching for any sign of her.



Want to know more? Check out the rest at Americymru's West Coast Eisteddfod.

Of Beautiful Things

My contribution to Collage Obsession’s long hair challenge.
I make old-school collages; just magazines, scissors, and glue. This one was inspired by the painting of Isolde by Gaston Bussiere (from 1911, see below - image courtesy of Wikicommons). I had the woman cut out already, and the magical bookshelves, but I carefully crafted her 2-part crown, the cup, the halo around her, and the four different backgrounds together. I also added some gold shading to give depth to her white dress. What a fun evening!

The colors immediately grabbed me, and the curious sadness in her expression.

I also wanted to take a minute to share two beautiful things that are brightening my week:

The Sleeper and the Spindle, by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Chris Riddell. While the story itself is not my favorite Gaiman piece (a bit clunky and weak on characterization for his writing, in my opinion, but still enjoyable), the book is a thing of beauty, like a gothic illuminated fairy tale.


Deeper Than Pink by Stacy Lynn Mar arrived, and I look forward to opening its bright pink cover and delving into the wonder beneath. Seriously, Stacy's poems can reach right into your chest and give your heart a squeeze. I can't imagine more perfect rush-hour train commute reading; people often try to converse with me, a bright pink poetry book might be the perfect shield.

The Flasher and the Fissure

October was a month like me,
a month smoked with wild dreams
welded shut with loss of leaves.
A blazing month that dropped its cloak.
Naked,
thus filled with gaping holes.

(How time flies! It hardly seems right to welcome November without bidding October adieu. October was a tough month. It brought death. It held lots of stress. But it also knew joy. And now I greet November the only way I can: one breath at a time, with a commitment to appreciate my blessings.)

November cuts into the ground,
cold and sharp and deeper down.
Therein lies the treasure here: cold claws
remove the gold, oil, smoldering belly of fire.
Rise, repeat; hurry! The snaggle-toothed Snow King is coming.
We must draw up what he will covet. Pull it up! Higher! Higher!

Squeaky Wheels

The market was miles away
and fleeing further, but the
night was creeping clumsily on.

one foot in front of the other

in a weekly ritual, his boots were worn
right through, right through the green
moss you could see his trail through
the squishy known unknown.

week after week, year after year,
he never saw a soul

through barrow and bog
he pushed his cart, the thump
of the wheels lamenting
motion. which is why he
noticed the absence of sound
for a heartbeat.
silence is an incantation,
invocation. she comes
in it.

she is alabaster,
a sculpture
carved of wind
and ice. he closes his eyes, inhales
the apparition – a sacrifice in smoke –
he smells the veil thinning between the worlds

he shivers with the
bogbreath, the breeze
all hot and cold. it sparks
all around him, an
unseen carnal force.

her arms caress
his wrinkled hands

he lets go the handle
of his cart,
reaches out to her

but she, like him,
is no more here

there is only
the cart

its wheels
spinning,
chirping,
leaping
over
the moment
before it
passes.


(For a prompt at Real Toads: Ghost stories using at least 3 of these words: fairy, portal, sacrifice, feast, smoke, winter, slaughter, spirit, veil, ritual, trick, & disguise.

I used: ritual, veil, sacrifice, & smoke, I think. Enjoy, and good night!)

From When Our Moon Became a Sun

Can you feel the fire inside you?
Forget it for tonight. Mask it with
the world around, feed it with your
flight. Lanterns swerve like fairy lights,
dodging sober shadows; matches strike.

sparklers sing. cigarettes light.

Somebodies stroll arm in arm, gaze at stars,
cry or laugh, walk alone, sip the past, we all
sink dark into our minds. We crave, we itch,
anticipate: sharpest flints that conflagrate.

Our signals smoke, swarm through
city loops. Round the concrete
paths and blocks, boxes
glass and moving
trucks, round the trees
pruned in their beds,
round the sky to
red smog wed.

Zaps run through
our beating blood,
flooding veins and bursting walls,
building lacks of barriers,

seeking: freedom, found
away. out of body, faint
indeed, branded still, scorches fade
into wild. woods. The edge-of-the-city fox
knows all, knows fall, its saffron leaves,
the pubs of candied corn and trail of acorn orbs.
The fox knows when the moon will rise,
it can place the smell of the harkening skies -
though time makes no scent. *Sniff.*

The fox smells the city air and finds
scents that make no sense. The moon within
the smoke, within the dreams, within
the humans, lies asleep. The Equinox
reduced to itchy patches, ancient,
embered chambers in their raw meaty hearts, balanced by
the choking blood, the steady beat, the broken glowing
from the ill-flamed furnace fanning
the forgotten memory:

the first fire lit by human hands, the
howl of triumph, ravenous flash of the flames
of knowledge leaping up. The world shifts drunk
under the gaze of this smoke-glazed moon, the selfsame
moon that reigned the night, the god of dark binding
humans blind. The selfsame humans with their restless hands,
blistered, fumbling in the dark, throwing out the rope,
lassoing the moon in the name of itchy, aching hope.

lassoed, tamed, and fought against:
the night, a brave new dawn.

(This poem was inspired by Pink.Girl.Ink.'s "Warning the Stars" prompt. The prompt's pretty sweet. Word? Word! Well, word-le. Wordle: it's a thing. Find out what at Pink.Girl.Ink!

Anywho, the prompt resonated with my muse. Images of electric light, magical illuminated moments contrasted to the mystique of night not clothed in manufactured light. A recent camping trip inspired me to contemplate darkness, grateful both for the opportunity to witness a wild night and for the ability to blot it out. There was some ensuing guilt and awe for what humankind has accomplished, and fear and hope for what's to come.)

Autumn Undone