Not for me a garden of dreams. Instead mine rip into my delicate brain sac, tear its membranes as though it were a placenta. These dreams, after a decade of being knocked out by heavy duty sedatives, anti-psychotics, basically an arsenal of lethal, at times, tempting, alluring, let’s just do me in drugs. Now dreams …
Hugging myself as though kicked in the gut, wanting to turn the lights out and write in the dark because the bulbs are bald and their eerie brightness sears, tears, rips right through me. Even my eyes are aching, crazy eyes in their socked out sockets, my mouth a crater and how many times have …
Marina Tsvetayeva wrote it, a long poem titled The Poem of the End, a mini epic of a poem about the ending of a long love affair. I wrote about that poem while in graduate school, can see myself at my tiny desk before a dirty window, shabbily dressed in a shabby apartment. I see …
Stevenesque blackbirds, grey March sky, the starkness almost alarming and the buds are still tucked in their wintry hoods. Cold rains on the way, for days this time, a brew of broody weather. No moon in the sky, but there is one in my heart and it is setting, slowly setting. In that moony heart …
I just came in from my evening seaside walk. Exotic black sand harvested by winter storms, heaps of seaweed with chartreuse and fuchsia tints, low, low tide, sun dousing itself in the marsh among cattails and red-winged blackbirds, moon rising on a quicksilver horizon. Such beauty, at its heart-wrenching heights, can be disarming, even alarming …
It can be done. We can capture the rapture of happiness, bring it home, feed it, love it like a stray animal till it’s named and tamed. Try this—think of the soul as a butterfly net, feel the wild flutterings within. When pregnant some seventeen years ago, my son’s first movements felt like a dancing …
Everyone knows that the writing of poetry, of becoming a poet, entails a long apprenticeship. Mine began at age nineteen, which was when I wrote my first poem. Both an initiation and a damnation, it was Plathian and full of deep, female associations: mother, womb, kitchen knife. In the years to come, I would carve …
I have the hands of a writer—a callous on my right ring finger, arthritis in that wrist from holding a pen for decades. If I could, I’d be buried pen in hand, or perhaps my ashes should be scattered upon the white page. Musicians, singers need to take great care of their hands and voices. …