“Finally Going to Tell You about the Staircase Ghost” was published today by editor Lisa M. Hase-Jackson at Zingara Poetry Review. This poem relates a couple of the “super”natural experiences I have had.
As befitting Mother’s Day, one of them occurred when I was a new mom. The other is a ghost story.
I closed comments over here, but comments are allowed at Zingara.
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Superstition Review is a literary journal from Arizona State University, and I am so tickled that they published two of my poems. Also, they posted an audio clip of my reading of both poems. Follow this link:
So you don’t even have to read them yourself, just put up your feet and listen for two minutes.
The first poem is called “One of Her Parents was a Float.” It’s a poem inspired by adoption. Until the poem I published with Plath Poetry Project a few months ago and this one I hadn’t written an adoption poem in a long time. I feel really pleased with the originality of this way of looking at the subject.
The second poem was inspired by seeing a photo online of a little girl named Minnie Rae PREGNANT in 1871 San Francisco.
In those days, there weren’t any services to help girls like this. Charity and all the baggage that came with it was all anyone could hope for. What baggage? Demands about doctrine, religion, and lifestyle, all the while not providing enough to live on.
But if you think nothing like this has happened in a long time, I’ll give you an anecdote from the late 70s. That is a long time ago now, but it has teemed in my head since then. The gardener’s cousin was married to a wonderful man who taught in an inner city school in a very poor area of NYC. One of his students was 8 years old and pregnant. He struggled with how to deal with the horrors he faced every day in the classroom.
Is stuff like this still going on today? Let me know what you think!
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Editor Lisa M. Hase-Jackson has published my poem “Maybe It was Spring” at Zingara Poetry Review. This poem is very different from the one also published a few hours ago at North of Oxford. That one is a dark story, a poem that reveals the real Medusa and what happened to her. You can find “Medusa’s #Metoo” in my previous post.
But “Maybe It was Spring” is a “risen” poem. It’s about all the possibilities of rebirth, renewal, and the hope of a miracle. It’s also a true story.
Click the image below to get to “Maybe It was Spring”:
If you have a WordPress blog, try following Zingara Poetry Review so you can be first to read the Zingara Poetry Picks!
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Founder and co-editor Christine Butterworth-McDermott really knows her way around a fairy tale. She understands their flexibility, responsibilities, and opportunities. So it was thrilling that she took one of my Red Riding Hood poems for the new issue of Gingerbread House Literary Magazine.
You can read it here and see the beautiful artwork that was paired with the poem: Interrogation
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This very sweet fairly new literary journal Dovecote has published one of my poems in their 3rd issue. Don’t you think the journal name is beautiful? A dovecote is a house for doves. I found this photo of a very old dovecote in the Utrecht province of the Netherlands on my old friend Wikipedia.
A place to house birds. A bird is often a metaphor for a poet. Because of the singing, ya know?
Well, oddly, my poem is not a singing sort of poem, but more of a shouting one. Here’s a different look at poetry than many people, especially people who don’t read a lot of poetry, hold.
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My third fall publication is in Wilderness House Literary Review. Thanks so much to Poetry Editor Kate Hanson Foster. No relation, although Hanson is my surname of birth.
Do you know the work of poet Adrienne Rich? One of my favorites. My poem originated as I meditated upon the opening line of a Rich poem. It is the 7th in a modern version of a sonnet sequence called Twenty-One Love Poems.
THE RICH POEM:
VII
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
–and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines’ howled signals,
that modulated cantata of the wild?
or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all—
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
Notice how the second line says, “What atonement is this all about?” Is writing a form of atonement? This is a good time to ponder that question because Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement begins at sundown today and lasts until sundown tomorrow.
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It is October, which means that it is OctPoWriMo, a poetry writing month. I can’t write one a day this month, but the special month itself did encourage me to write one this weekend using inspiration from the Plath Poetry Project.
Burningword Literary Journal has published my poem “Elegy.” This poem is on a solo ride with emotion and maybe shows a bit of my love of Sylvia Plath poetry (it is not the poem I wrote this weekend) and for fairy tales.
For those who don’t realize, an elegy is a type of poem. It is a lament for someone who has died or something that is lost. Anything described as elegiac is mournful.
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It’s fun that a wonderful new lit mag called Thimble has published my poem “Behold the Needle.” Isn’t that a perfect fit, though?
I hope that it speaks to people who have lived in more than one place and to those of us who feel a part of the place that they live. How much a part of you is your hometown, the state or the country you have made your own, or all the places you ever touched down in?
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Moms on Poetry has reprinted a poem from my first collection Doll God.
Thrilled to be in good company. One of the other poems is by Karen Paul Holmes from her book No Such Thing as Distance. I reviewed that book for Pleiades. You can find more about it here.
Here is the poem up at Moms on Poetry:
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Chewy.com called my girl Kana “furdorable” on Twitter the other day!
Are they right?
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The Ekphrastic Review has reprinted another poem from my first collection Doll God. As I mentioned last week, the journal is a very unique literary magazine. The emphasis is on publishing writing that responds to visual art. Thus the name of the journal. Check out this article for explanation: Ekphrasis
Thank you to editor Lorette C. Luzajic for choosing my poem “Debris.” There is a strong connection between the poem and my mother-in-law’s art.
Here is the poem up at The Ekphrastic Review:
The photo above is the cover of the book that is a story of The Birdland jazz club illustrated by my mother-in-law’s Birdland murals. That is where my photos on the journal site originate from–not the actual murals themselves.
That wraps up a full week of five poem publications. I hope you’ve enjoyed them and aren’t jumping out of your tree to get away from my postings. Closing comments, but you are more than welcome to post at the site. Thank you!
I’ll leave you with the cutie pie Perry.
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