My World and Welcome to It
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Slingshot: This Is Not Where I’m Supposed to Be
I waken at about 1 a.m. and stare at the wall, trying not to look at the clock, its white number so stark, so painfully truthful. It’s past midnight. Hours loom before me. You’re not asleep. This is not your house. This is not your bed. Those are not your children down the hall. There are no children down the hall. No sighs, no whimpers, no calls for a sip of water. The girls are in their own beds, in the next town. Their father is the gatekeeper. The divorce is not going well and he has decided to keep them all, against their will, against mine, to make…
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Fill Your Paper…
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. –William Wordsworth When I sit to write my blog, I am like the slot machine that comes up with one lemon, one X and one banana peel. It takes a few pulls to get gold. As I sat late this Sunday evening to write the elusive *something* I wanted to write, I saw the clipped-out graphic with those words from the aptly named Wordsworth. So, to follow my own instructions, here is what is breathing in my heart. I want to write beautiful, wrenching things that leave clawmarks as I drag them into light. I want to describe the color of…
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Home at the Edge of the World: Alameda Poet Laureate Inaugural Poem
Home at the Edge of the World Alameda Poet Laureate Inaugural Poem There are houses down your shaded streets – beneath your oaks, your ginkos, your avenues of palm – Leaded in glass, shingled in fish-scale, spangled with gingerbread, Victorian ladies tarted up for Carnival, their history and lore curving like a staircase into view. Gentlemen strolled in spats, ladies swung their parasols, bay breezes curling with fog and the clank of halyards, snapping flags. Water, at every turn, glittering to shore, to ship, to ankles and toes. Neptune would have been pleased to see his name emblazoned, to hear the calliope, the splash and crank, the punch of tickets.…
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I Get Anxious
My husband says I’m a delicate flower, and while, yeah, that’s true, it’s not all that’s true. I have anxiety. I have PTSD. I have issues. This is not a case of disease-or-malady-of-the-week, a la celiac wannabees, or whatever Madison Avenue tells us this month is wrong with us (You need oat bran! You need Vitamin E! You need aloe!). I really, really get anxious. I take a little pill each morning which cuts out the crazy part of anxiety — the part that screams all day long in my ear WE’RE DOOMED. YOU F*CKED UP AGAIN. EVERYONE HATES YOU. DIE DIE DIE. And for this, I am truly grateful to…
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Don’t think it strange —
I’ve been on the hunt for a fountain pen. I had one around here somewhere, I swear, but of course it’s gone, like the rest of my mind when I want to find something. I am the proud owner of not just one, but two feather quills with filigree silver points, but I don’t exactly want that kind of ink experience. Somewhere, back in the beyond, I once owned a Montblanc pen, not top of the line, but a fine instrument. And it has gone the way of all things I used to have: into the nevernever of my attic, lost in my old desk at work, left behind at…
