I’m not a published poet, yet! But I have been working on a collection of poems about women to be submitted as a manuscript. I need something like 50 (!!!) poems so the process has been daunting. Below are a few of the poems that will appear in the collection:
femme desolare
the sierra nevadas cup
the valley like hands for a drink
that hollow embrace,
that desert bone
she’s coming back
the hundred year rain.
we know this,
so we stay.
under the yellow sun
under our midday blaze
she’s coming back
the hundred year rain.
we hope this
so we till our gardens
rake them sideways,
grey as they’ve always been
all this time
she’s coming back,
a petal encore
a furious feast of green
a hungry summer ache.
the hollow embrace of a woman
who has known the desert home
to be harsh and relentless
in her absence.
white men no college
White men no college
never read Virginia Woolf
on the toilet in the morning
early morning, 5 am morning
not having woken up but
never having gone to bed
never having felt that sleep
was safe, or that time was plenty
holding her in hand like a white dove
Mrs. Dalloway on the roof
deck of a bus headed away toward the city
white men no college
will live forever without that scene
will grow old beautifully untouched by ache
dusted with golden flecks of hate;
white men no college
have in their canvas hands
the bald heads of daughter babies
whose eyelashes are infinite
and hold in them a future
empty of trees—perhaps—busy with busses
who might go away, far away, to college
and hold in her pale hands
a borrowed novel, a stream of conscious
a woman she might someday be.
quagmire kinfolk
the girl in the marsh was me
when I was small and we were lost
I left the hurt there in the marsh
to be cleansed by mists
(to be) wavering weeds
the girl in the marsh was me
and I was younger then but
not so young
as to meet dread for the first time
he and I walked alongside
grassy heaps
and ferried our secrets
the girl(in) the marsh was me
I left her there to wait on my return…
the marsh, she knew all
about the low hanging fog
and the weight
of water
in the
quag
