New chapbook of poems

If you’d like a copy of this chapbook,
let me know in the comment section below.
If you haven’t signed up for the blog,
you can do that too.
Thank you!

When death enters

We have no words of welcome for you here.

Did you take a wrong turn, forget the address?

What purpose in taking this woman, this mother, this wife?

What twist of fate have you tapped into?

Why slip in to take this life without a whisper?

We’re left to make sense of your choices.

To find purpose in a life without.

To recreate faith and hope.

That’s what humans do

after you leave.

 

 

Weekly photo challenge: Signs

A sign in the Boston Museum of Art that spoke to me.

And it made me think of this poem. The title refers to a story told at a poetry workshop — about, well, taking the plunge and jumping naked off a barge.

Naked Barge Jumping

Let’s make it mid-July
by a shimmering poem
without mosquitoes.
We leap open-mouthed
from a rickety barge
into cool cedar odes.
Our cleansed forms
rise to metaphor
as assonance resounds
through hidden verse.
Let’s jump off again
and again and again,
with just as much fear
and joy as the first rhyme.

Published in The Rhode Island Writers Circle Anthology, 2008

Related articles

• Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sign Says (donnalimone.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sign Says (blatherskiteblog.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sign Says (bicycles go where?) (chrisbreebaart.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sign Says (mykindofhappiness.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sign Says (atthistimeanna.wordpress.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: The Sign Says – Einstein Was Here (khanasweb.com)
• Weekly Photo Challenge: The sign says… (elspethc.wordpress.com)

3 more poem finds homes!

Dear Julia:

Thank you for submitting your work to The Midwest Writing Center’s Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest.  We are pleased to announce that our preliminary judges have chosen the top 25 poems in each of our two categories (national and regional) for publication in the 2011 edition of Off Channel.

We are also very pleased to inform you that your poems “Here right here is where” and “Learning How to Paint Light” have been selected as part of the qualifying group of national finalists.

From these 25 poems in each category (your work included), our final judges will soon select the winners, who will be notified by July 15, 2011.

Please inform us immediately upon receipt of this letter if you need to withdraw your work from consideration / publication due to acceptance elsewhere.

Visit our website, www.midwestwritingcenter.org, periodically for contest updates or to order copies of Off Channel.

Best wishes,

Kristin Abraham
Coordinator, Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest
Midwest Writing Center
225 E. Second Street, Suite 303
Davenport, IA  52801
563-324-1410

And!!!!

Dear Julia,

We are delighted to accept your poem “Sleepless on Manning Drive” for publication in Naugatuck River Review’s Summer 2011 issue. Thank you so much for submitting!

All the Best,

Lori Desrosiers
Publisher
Naugatuck River Review

I haven’t been writing much poetry lately, so these latest acceptances are poking me in the side to get back to work. Glad to hear these three found homes. There are a few others that I need to brush off and get back out circulating too. I’ll post these as soon as I hear about their fate in July.