nature

In Response to My 13 Year-Old Daughter’s Letter

/ stephanielharper / 16 Comments
Starlight 01

Cameren at age 4, taken Mother’s Day 2005

In Response to My 13 Year-Old Daughter’s Letter

Apologize? For regretting your birth?

That the white dove of sarcasm
has officially fledged from your belly
alit on the canopy     & uncaged its crystal trill
comes to me as no surprise

But neither of us could have foreseen the power
your brooding would conceive of pencil & ire
before the moment you spat out   crumpled     & hand delivered
my saltwater baptism

Your own tears     now dried for hours     blaze for me
from the gold heart in your gray-green eyes
willing my belief that you truly didn’t realize
I’ve been there your whole life

At sundown     I’m the one always stumbling through the wood
like some sort of village idiot     brandishing my dim lantern
at the giant pines     as if I might catch them in the act
of uprooting themselves     & slinking away

Though you flit by & vanish into the trees
in a flash I can barely make out as a memory
your trace among the cedars & silvertips remains as innate in me
as the wolf’s way to her newborn cub’s whimper

Two months early
yet already ripe for the triumph
& pain only the fiercest have dared to carry in one body
you were born to fly from me—

& so     how could I ever be sorry
to know of finding you over & over again?

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

Thank you to editor Eli T. Mond for giving this piece a home in the December 2017 edition of The Ibis Head Review.

“In Response to My 13 Year-Old Daughter’s Letter” is included in my debut poetry chapbook, This Being Done, which is available for order NOW from Finishing Line Press!

If you would like to order a copy, I ask that you please do so as soon as possible before the deadline for pre-publication orders on April 27, 2018. Although my book is scheduled for release in June, the print-run is based on a minimum quota of copies ordered during the two-month presale period ending on April 27, 2018.

Order online: This Being Done, by Stephanie L. Harper 

I’d like to express my heartfelt gratitude to any of you who have already preordered This Being Done. Your investment in and appreciation for who I am and what I do means more to me than I could ever adequately express. This journey wouldn’t be the same without your support!

Avium Morbum MMXVII

/ stephanielharper / 8 Comments
Chickadee

Photo by Cameren Harper, May 2017

This spring, it seemingly isn’t enough
that we’ve once again converted our porch
into a brood-rearing safe haven:
The once-adorable, amiable models
of avian parental prowess that have been
gracing us with their proximity
for years, are now a couple of flighty,
black & white fluff-balls of aggression. 

It’s like their little bird brains just
suddenly lost all sense of perspective—
their former bearing of healthy respect
toward us & our home has morphed
into a hostile face-off of assaults
on the front door window, dive-bombing
campaigns on the car in the driveway,
replete with poo, & kamikaze-style strikes
on their equally-fraught reflections
in the side-view mirror.

Why, my teen-aged son has been asking,
are the Chickadees being so stupid?

Of course, he already understands
that the answer to his question lies
in another question—which, come to think
of it, is THE question that everyone I know
has been asking for months, since nobody
is really surprised anymore when something
extreme, irrational, or just plain opposite-of-
intelligent happens—it’s as if the Bizarro World
episode of Seinfeld just started up again on its own,
& in its antithetical-T.V.-show fashion, decided
never to end—because, apparently, Nature, itself,
is being required to stretch its fabric all out of proportion
in effort to accommodate the unprecedentedly-dense
troposphere’s lambasting winds; but I find myself

ask-answering him, anyway, if only half-hopeful
that this serum synthesized of not-reasons might yet
suffice to inoculate him against such rife contagion:

Do they remind you of anyone?

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

“Avium Morbum MMXVII” was first drafted during the May 2017 Tupelo Press 30/30 challenge.

My new poetry chapbook, This Being Done, is available for advance copy purchase at Finishing Line Press from now until April 27, 2018. The number of orders received during this two-month pre-publication sales period will determine the size of the print run, which is currently scheduled for release on June 22, 2018. For more info CLICK HERE!

On Seeing

/ stephanielharper / 9 Comments

Moose Lips!

“What we say we see says a lot about who we are.” – Ocean Vuong

“Why is no one ever looking when I use air quotes?”  – Matthew Harper

Sunspots through cloud-cover
Moose lips
Butterfly fuzz
Honey bees kissing lavender stalks
Spring breezes blowing cottonwood seeds into drifts 

Convection popcorning in the flame-blue east
Summer shimmering hayfield-rivers
Dust-devils whirling out of a midday calm
A dragonfly poised above a stagnant pond
its wings “wiggling—they don’t flap” 

The spider     like Godzilla’s more graceful cousin
terrorizing the webcam’s livestream
of pedestrians on a bridge over the Willamette
attended by the oblivious
broadcasts of a classical radio station 

A mother skunk trailed by three kits
emerging at midnight from the greenspace
across the street—their bottle-brush tails
going vertical    as my son    quivering
encroaches with his camera—
& erring on the side of sweet mercy     again 

A one & a half twisting layout somersault
from a trampoline—lights swirling in figure-eights
fifteen feet above the ground

Moose lips     & butterfly fuzz

The ease of every convoluted moment

The relative difficulty of ease

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

Butterfly Fuzz 3

Photos by Matthew Harper 

 

Beesiness as Usual

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Beesiness As Usual_Matthew Harper

One of the many advantages giving birth to and raising a natural-born photographer offers, is that when your debut chapbook of poetry gets accepted for publication nineteen years later (and you happen to have the slightest inkling of how blessed you are), you will already have an “in” with a brilliant cover artist!

I’m so proud to share with all my WordPress Compatriots that this gorgeous photo, “Beesiness as Usual,” by my son, the one and only Matthew Harper, will be gracing the cover of my poetry chapbook, This Being Done (Finishing Line Press). Stay tuned for more announcements regarding my book’s availability for pre-publication order and estimated release date (don’t worry, I won’t let you forget…)!

In the meantime, please check out the following beautiful poetry collections — also forthcoming from Finishing Line Press — and available for order now:

From Every Moment A Second, by Robert Okaji

Anastasia Maps, by Devi S. Laskar

 

DAY 30! DAY 30!

/ stephanielharper / 13 Comments

This feels a lot more like a beginning than an ending. I’ve accomplished a thing I wouldn’t have guessed I could (though, now I really have my work cut out for me with nearly 7,000 words of new poetry to edit!), and while my eyes are newly opened to the enormous specter of how very little I actually know in this life, I’m feeling eager for the next lesson. I am so humbled by and grateful for your interactions and support this month here on WordPress! From the bottom of my heart, thank you all!

convective_tower

Letter from the Other Side of Halfway 

…Taking a tip from the meadowlark, I head for the high
desert, my flight path crossing the sagebrush-dotted,
red earth, hoping I’ll soon look down & see you floating
in a sea of ten gallon hats, just beyond the convection
columns braced against the electric blue sky.
I don’t suppose your self-claimed exile looks anything
like I’ve imagined? It’s not with a small twinge of jealousy
that I seek consolation in your brand of solitude on the other
side of that horizon line…

The above is an excerpt. Read the whole poem (and catch up on Days 1-29) here!

Western Meadowlark

Day 29! One More to Go!

/ stephanielharper / 18 Comments
jack in the pulpit

This is Jack, the real-life subject of Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1930s study

Jack’s in the Pulpit

Inspired by Daniel Schnee   

My verdant brethren of the forest floor
what need have ye for addling adornments?

Shed your dreams of sepals!   Bare your fleshy
spadices…

Continue reading here!

jill-in-the-pulpit

and the lovely Jill!

My Day 14 Poem for the May 30/30 Challenge is up at Tupelo Press

/ stephanielharper / 2 Comments
Chickadee

Photo by Cameren Harper

Trumpluenza

  

It isn’t enough, it seems, that we’ve again afforded them
a safe haven on our porch in which to rear their broods:
The once-adorable, amiable models of avian parental prowess…

Continue reading here!

Learn more about the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project here!

 

My Day 7 poem for the May 30/30 Challenge is up at Tupelo Press!

/ stephanielharper / 1 Comment

crocodile_above_the_water_044013_

Crocodile

Sly for a six-footer     you are
a briny guy     stretched out     & chill

as in     literally    a cold-blooded
dinosaur with a killer instinct

When the tide flows in     your heart slows…

Continue reading here…

 

Find out how you can participate here!

 

Alabaster

/ stephanielharper / 11 Comments

 

alabaster

I am a pink rose petal’s pale glow

black ash tamped in furrows
between the breath of the living
& the souls of the dead

the dawn’s blush unfurling over sand dunes

& seagulls soaring on thermal spirits
of iodine      salt     & shellfish

& sometimes     scattering in the wind
I can’t find where everything else ends     & I begin

Now rising from the morning hush     this cloud of me
speaks to the red tail hawk perched on a streetlamp
& tells her I’m fine     because I’m still not sure
how to talk about not being fine

I am an instar     trying to be
the clearest version of myself     to sculpt
a final skin of lucent crystal

so that when you come to see my cinder eyes
glinting diamond dust     I will be
the embered dusk bleeding into the sea

& you will know the truth of me

embered-dusk

A previous version of this poem first appeared in Sixfold magazine, winter 2014.