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Out of sorrow beautiful things may come.
In June, I will lead a poetry project through the Recovery Academy* with women clients of Acadiana Outreach. What I hope to achieve in the nine sessions is to give participants, through structured,...
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Blog Tour: Process Talk
What are you working on? I am working on a second manuscript of poetry with hopes for a second book. When Eating the Heart First (Press 53, 2012) was done and out in the world, I was consumed...
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“Off Qi”
Off Qi I drop a pen on the floor twice within 30 seconds I knock over an open bottle of mouthwash into the cat litter box A drip of coffee like a gentle stroke from a thin sable brush on a white...
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Into the Ground
Let me explain: Love roots. Love thrives. My father was a widower when he met my mother. He lost his first wife to cancer. Her name was Viola, and she was the mother of his first three children. He...
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“Hands like flushed doves”
Washing my hands this morning, I thought of Noami Vincent, who was like a great aunt to me. She was my grandmother’s neighbor from the time that my grandparents (along with my mother and her siblings)...
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Good Fortune
“Things I once thought unbelievable in my life have all taken place.” ~PJ Harvey, “Good Fortune” Ten years ago, I set forth on the path of The Writing Life. It has taken me to places I never...
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Seen and Unseen
As a poet, I have been given gifts of perception and the tool of language. As a poet, I have an almost clairvoyant apprehension of things seen and unseen. I embrace my “self” as visionary and humbly...
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Watching the Wheels
I forgot who I was. I knew the age spot on my left cheek. I knew the sagging breasts and the overlapping belly. I knew my feet; my unusually small toes. I knew my eyes and what they had seen. I knew...
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My personal mind/body revolution
I have undertaken a determined and whole self-initiative to remake my body and recalibrate my attitudes. I am excited, but more importantly, I am focused on making this a permanent aspect of my...
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ONE
I have this one life. I am addressing areas that have been neglected and treating myself with love and care, whereas in the past I harmed myself. I have no apologies for reclaiming my energies to...
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Between Land and Sky
Blue sky peppered with blackbirds. Blue deepens to black in the west. I am on the Dixie Chopper cutting grass. My lines are straight. Grass exits the chute and makes a pile of clippings to the right of...
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Time for Fire: a prose poem-in-progress
stains of our existence we were here and there too layers of our lives we undress, unravel the private vision shared through language through paint, through the movement of our arms, legs, face muscles...
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“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” ― William...
It has taken me this long to believe in the possible. I wanted to believe that I could believe in the possible, but I wasn’t there. Now I am. Today I step forward on a bridge across a chasm. Today I...
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Need
I saw a photo. A man casually reclined at the prow of a small sailboat in a harbor on the Nile. The man’s easy-way was obvious. His contentment was too. His sins were not apparent. He looked uneven, as...
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Word by Word
I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living. –Anne Morrow Lindberg Writing saves my life every day. Word by word, I have...
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Conception
The first draft of this poem was conceived at a writing lunch attended by Bessie Senette and I at Sandra Sarr’s home in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana on Wednesday, June 15th, after I pondered the goddess...
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Writing At Rêve Coffee Roasters
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) Nu au bord de la mer (1909) “The unpainted world accepts the shore” a line from Wallace Stevens’ “So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch” (1947) She pulls the string from...
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Clarity
Clarity The words out loud a reverberation river-beaten voice echo-soft, too mouthful in mouth heavy sighs, lost-light breath braced in a lung embraced breast cries caught in a backbone no callused...
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A plague of emotions*
Before the Harvest Locusts come in a cloud of winged thunder. They come for the sockets and the eye itself, (seer of all things). They come for the marrow and curse the bone into a galaxy of...
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Nameless City
“Nameless City,” mixed media, Clare L. Martin, 2016 “Each bone is a highway. Each organ’s a town on the map of the body.” What is the nameless city he has taken me to? In it, we reside in a junky...
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