I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough? ~Van Gogh
Tag Archives: photography
A photographer edits out our smartphones to show our strange and lonely new world
Please click for Pickersgill’s “Removed” photo series: Source: A photographer edits out our smartphones to show our strange and lonely new world
Between Darkness and Light
Beautiful photos, words & concept by Steve McCurry.
Broken & Beautiful
I never know what I’m going to do in art, whether literary or visual. Yet I’ve recently been inspired by the concept Broken & Beautiful since we all are, one way or another.
One of the TedTalk speakers points out that the chance of you or I existing is 1 in 400,000,000,000, which makes each of us inherently beautiful.
Yet most of us are also broken one way or another and we’ll all experience death and possibly illness and old age. Yet we’re also brand new within seven years, all of our cells replaced, some replicating 10 to the 22nd power every second.
While these numbers are unfathomable to me, I fully grasp how vulnerable and resilient we are.
Though I thought Broken & Beautiful was an original idea, an internet search demonstrated that others are working with this concept. Still, I love the theme and will continue using eggs to explore it.
Why eggs? They’re gorgeous: their shape, texture and range of interior and exterior colors. They’re also the beginning of life for many species and must be broken for that life to live independently. So I’ve broken and eaten the eggs (yum) and also knit the heart-scarf.
To our beauty and resilience as well as the power of our vulnerability and ways that we’re broken.
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.
Iris
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.
What Surprised Me Most
What Surprised Me Most
beneath surgery-bright restaurant lights
was the unspoken collusion of employees and patrons
to ignore the bone-defined man as he tapped thin-paned glass to beg for food.
He shoved skeletal hands toward his gaping mouth as if to fill the gnawing
we could not imagine while digesting pasta and merlot rather than
our muscles to survive as this man’s body had, his hollowed face
pleading as he mimed across the chasm of language, culture, class.
After the waiter returned our leftovers, snug in styrofoam,
I took them across the restaurant, my legs heavy beneath reproach’s
hypnotic weight from those unwilling to squander rules of etiquette
that weave the fabric that insures our warmth as others freeze.
Once outside I saw him, through my breath, accept a dollar from
two spike-heeled women as they scuttled from a restaurant across the street,
yet money’s a tool for future trade, no immediate relief for the churning gut.
Drunk with hunger, he wavered in the crosswalk till a horn startled him
back to the curb. Waving, I caught his eye, offered the bright box. Our eyes
locked yet he wouldn’t move, suspended in a code more compelling than
hunger’s desperation, a code older than the south and dangerous as asphyxiation.
Cloaked in privilege, I left our paltry leftovers on the metal bus stop bench
and returned to the restaurant’s glare, each of us visible through glass walls.
He sprinted across the street, gulped what would have been tomorrow’s lunch,
threw away the box, and returned to the window beside us.
He smiled, waved, tried to thank me, but I saw him only peripherally,
embarrassed to accept gratitude for so little before he walked away.
Thank you to the editors of decomP magazinE who first published this poem.
Choose
There are two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as if everything is a miracle.
~Albert Einstein