My Latest Book! Available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites

 

 These are three wonderful anthologies that feature my poems, among many others'. I highly recommend them. Forgotten Women is from Grayson Books. Stay Salty is from Read Furiously. Worth More Standing is from Canada, and should be available at the usual book venues.

 Here is my third book, published by Read Furiously in 2020! This one is close to my heart, as the poems in it are about growing up in Paterson NJ during the 50s and 60s.

Tuesday Poem: Announcement

I am pleased to post about my second book here. 

The Girls In Their Iron Shoes was published in 2016 

by Finishing Line Press. 

It's available at their website and on Amazon.com

The Witch Series

Witch’s Prayer

To wear a hat made of rain

to float like a little skiff

into the enveloping mist.

To be naked and fogbound,

to be cloud caressed

and chilled to the marrow.

To be invisible, wild

as a neutrino bouncing

across the emptiness,

blissfully small, to be

a blip, a phoneme,

O no, no O, O no name .

To see nothing, to take

nothing in for a change,

to move through

the blessing of blankness

all your cells drunk

on the smell of earth,

water, and air.

To feel yourself dissolving

into something vast

and sentient. Smoke

from a slow burning fire.

To let go of the world, this life,

for a few free moments,

face the clean white page,

and begin the story anew

So mote it, for me

so mote it be.

The Witch Series

Crone Song

My face is a hex                     

made of clouds                       

rapidly passing.

These hands betray,               

and always pay                      

what the cards tell them.

Where is the beak that can peck away at sorrow?

My knees are a jinx

crusted and frozen

over, leaving me

rooted and tree slow.

These feet search

floor after floor          

for the path

that will lead me

to what must be said.

What chain opens up grief’s damper,

so its terrible vapors can fly?

A vestigial tail

at the base of my spine,

wags at the prospect of relief.

My mouth unlocks

in harmony.

The Witch Series

Sue Cross

took herself out one day,

to the woods she’d been foraging in

for years, went out among the may-apples,

colts foot, burdock, lamb’s quarter,

plants she read , nature’s literature,

expanding her life beyond itself,

nurturing woods, medicinal woods –

learning all its secrets, riding the steady

wheel of the seasons, its comings and goings,

the small predictable bounties.

Woods she’d come to, after quitting nursing,

collecting for teas, elixirs, and tinctures,

taking other peoples’ children

on wild foods walks, collecting

watercress, nettles, ramps,

and in the spring, morels, their tiny

convoluted skulls peeping out among the roots.

I can hear her low voice, its sibilant consonants

and vowel melodies filling the afternoon shade

with the riches all around us, opening our eyes.

Herbalist, house wren,

small, watchful, and full of knowledge,

went out to the woods alone

one day, not long after her divorce,

stood at the edge of the deepest

rock ravine, and threw herself down.

Who knows how long she lay there,

awake and aware, as the raptors

went sliding overhead, how many

nights she watched them turn into stars?

Those of us who saw her

for the hero she was trying so hard to be,

hope new shoots feathered up

around her, unfurling a green caress,

that little birds gathered above her,

to sing her their sweetest songs.