Credit: Unsplash
It’s my awesome privilege to share that two of my poems, “Great Horned Owls” (an In-titled Poem) and “Love Poem with Eight Answers” (written for my magnificent husband, Bob) are now live in the illustrious journal, Cultural Daily! I’m honored and touched that editor Bunkong Tuon selected these pieces for publication.
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I had the distinct pleasure of joining Katherine Heiss of Brick Street Poetry on the Off the Bricks Poetry Podcast to read and discuss a few poems from my newest poetry collection, We Have Seen the Corn, available for order online at Kelsay Books and Amazon.
Have a listen and enjoy!
I’m always glad for the chance to publish (and thereby share 😊) another love poem inspired by my one and only, Robert Okaji! So, I’m grateful to the poetry editing team, assisted by Candice Daquin, of Parcham Magazine based in Kolkata, India, for including “Letter from the Other Side of Silence” in their August 2023 issue, which was just released on October 12.
Can you even believe how lucky I am?
The Purity of Starch
Betrayal or spark, I cannot refuse this
course. One look, the merest touch,
and I imagine lips and inverted
hearts, and books lying open on
pine stumps, caught in a wavering
dream of wildflowers and perfumed
hair, of short nights and tangled
sheets, the lemon-half moon hovering
overhead. This is too much. It is never
enough. I want the purity of heavy starch,
the stillness of sanctity, of certainty
in discretion and falsehood strummed
true. I want this flaw healed. I want
skin on skin, tongue to tongue, and
unuttered words seared through flesh
and into bone in that chamber where
everything is nothing, and implication
drills deeper than truth, truer than love,
and only we remain hidden at its core.
But today’s rain carries warnings
of rising waters and wreckage washed
downstream, and as I listen to recordings
of your voice, because that is what…
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Thank you to editor Tara Wheeler for selecting my poem, “Trace,” for inclusion in Dust Poetry’s gorgeous Portrait issue. I’m particularly touched by Tara’s heartfelt message of appreciation for the poetry community in her editor’s note for this issue. It means a great deal to me as a contributor to know how much the editor values the artists’ voices her publication represents. This is what it’s all about!
I’m also especially excited by the timing of this issue’s release, because it just so happens that I will be reading this poem to my husband-to-be in our (socially distanced…) marriage ceremony TOMORROW, September 25, 2020!
My poem “We Have Seen the Corn” is now live in Issue #27 of Riggwelter Press! I’m grateful to editor Jonathan Kinsman for selecting this piece, and honored to have my work bringing up the rear of this terrific collection of short prose and poetry.
(Switch into full-screen when you open the issuu file, and everything will come into beautiful focus!)
Trace
For Bob
In your morning pouring of coffee,
eggs whisked, peppers diced,
& pancetta browning; in the unsolidified
splatters you cleanse from the countertop;
in Pandora’s box of Edgar Meyer phenotypes
unseating the disquietude of our former lives;
in afternoon cappuccinos you pronounce in Italian
& in your full belly’s tranquil cogitations;
in your evening removal of socks & your feet’s relief;
in your crescent smile’s light sheltering me,
& with my kisses pressing away the decades of iniquities
to trace their thoroughfare to my universe of courage
secured within the dimple of your left cheek—
is everywhere my home will be.
THIS BEAUTIFUL POEM!!! 😍
My poem “Clandestine” is live in Issue 6 of Kissing Dynamite. I am grateful to the KD team for taking this piece.
My poem, “Salt,” (just scroll down) is live at the Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, the “love” issue, just in time for Valentine’s Day! Many thanks to editors Steve Gordon and Terri Lynn Cummings for sensitively engaging with and selecting this piece for publication.
I’m caught in a quagmire
of dirty dishes, dog-hair-
strewn & stained floors,
& generally ineffectual
functions of utility, where
the minutes are consumed,
one after the other, by my
heart’s double-time ticking
moving time backward. This
body frozen in the here & now
is not the same me as all the atoms
I am, retracing their steps to find
the self I was in that past life—
the one who recognized
younger-you from a photo—
whose every cell sears me
with lightning, as wildfire smoke
wells up like a tidal wave from
the seed of being & time,
exclaiming, He’s the One!
SLHARPERPOETRY 