Anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
David Whyte, The House of Belonging
Always Humming
Category: Body Art/Tattoo
Sound
Poetry doesn’t exist to give you prose. It’s this other thing. It is something that has to do with the sound of words, the sound of letters, the spaces between words, letters, how words connect to the mind and to the throat at the same time.
My 2012 in Pictures
The Losses:
My 84-year-old mom holding her 9-year-old self
and two weeks before she passed, my father-in-law also did along with his pocketful of index cards and pens so he’d never lose an important thought
The Blessings:
A week at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers
and the crescent shadows during the solar eclipse
The Joyous Victories:
The Discoveries:
and Rain Fingerhut’s voice
Peace to all of you throughout the New Year!
Elizabeth
Bumblebees
“Oh, I love bumblebees. They’re the teddy bears of the insect world.”
(Nick Chase overheard a woman in Rockridge garden say the above, published in Public Eavesdropping, San Francisco Chronicle.)
Pentimento
PENTIMENTO
How his crew cut head froze, poised above the place I could not see between my thighs, his short rodent hair arcing from my hairless mound, my mind providing the anesthesia of amnesia as if a spinal block flowed through a slender needle, numbing my body clean. And now that you’ve cut your long wheat field hair, he is the one I see near my belly, holding a switchblade against the rivulets of warmth that run from your tongue through my lips, radiating out hips thighs breasts arching back outstretched fingers. Remembering till now only my hatred of him, but as your fingers touch my inner thigh, images slice through muscle of his hand on my throat, palm in my stomach, head pressed into the opening I could not see, and I want to run from your arms which have held me warm against your chinchilla skin. As your pomegranate taste hits the back of my throat, his rancid stench catches, numbs my body clean.
Thank you to the editor of Rising to the Dawn for publishing this poem.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 