ALL RESPONSES |
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in response to a Thin Place
Heute, nur Heute *********************Only today
Bin ich so schoen; ********************am I this fair.
Morgen, ach Morgen *******************Morning will bring
Muss alles vergehn!********************loss and despair.
Nur diese Stunden ********************Only this hour
Bist du noch mein; ********************are you my own.
Sterben, ach sterben ******************Die but I will
Soll' ich alein. ***********************forgotten, alone.
translated from a poem by Theodor Strom |
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In response to Perpetual Gift
Two-year-old Madison, blonde, blue eyes,
stands in the driveway,
talks around the pacifier held expertly in her small mouth,
looks at me round-eyed,
points skyward--"Moon,"
she says. And there it is, mid-afternoon spectacle,
waxing, half-lighted. Good
of you to notice, Madison.
Thirty-eight years ago today
your countrymen first set foot up there.
They looked up, as we are now, to see
the earth in the heavens. Shakes one up a little
thinking about it, Madison.
We went there to win a race, to beat
someone else out, be the first.
But going to the moon didn't change us.
It revealed us, the astronaut said, helped us
understand our lives
more than we ever dreamed. Up became down;
down became up.
The moon will do that to you.
Keep searching out this orb, Madison.
Think about the lunar rock sitting in the museum,
rock older than our world--Genesis, they call it.
Think about it, Madison,
as you dig in the stones that landscape
the front of the house.
Carry off your blue bucket full of pebbles
rounded by time, wind, water.
Keep looking over your shoulder
at the big one in the sky.
Imagine what it's like to watch the earth
while walking on the moon.
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“I'm telling you, everything is metaphor for something else.”
I once again listened to Chuck expound upon his most closely held beliefs, an impassioned diatribe that had paced to and fro within the confines of his right mind since last weekend. Now, it was set free by the universal solvent of his favorite drink, the brandy Manhattan. He wasn't a purist with cocktails, though. All he needed was red vermouth, whiskey, and ice. Cherries were always nice, and bitters he could do without. Anyway, after the third drink, it didn't matter.
“It's like this cherry – What does it mean to us? Is it a fruit? A virgin? Mars with a stem?”
We were nestled into our favorite dive near the U on a Saturday afternoon. The way we see it, Why wait? Especially if you just slept for ten hours and ate breakfast at noon. I would always order eggs, hash browns and bacon, complimented appropriately with a Bloody Mary and a beer, of course. Chuck would order a huge stack of pancakes with a side of sausage, and would start drinking those damned strong Manhattans. We'd both watch the generous scoops of butter melt, flowing over the doughy mass into a pool of syrup. Metaphor, my ass.
“Each and every thought is a particle of data, just like in a computer, and it's all stored in a relational database we call the universe.”
Sometimes I think Chuck should have stayed in education. There he was, teaching Logic and Cognitive Harmonics at the U, when he up and decided to become an SQL programmer. Structured Query Language, the Rosetta Stone of data. It's not that he was a bad teacher, but he somehow needed another framework to anchor himself to Earth. A high-grade alloy cable to keep him from being thrown out of orbit into oblivion. As it turned out, he was just as happy designing Customer Relationship Management applications as he was working his lake property with a chainsaw, or playing the harp, or teaching linguistics. They were all they same to him.
“One or zero, yes or no, being or non-being, form or formless. We are all reduced to a very simple algorithm that governs everything from sex to the growth of yeast colonies.”
With that, I ordered another beer. |
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to perpetual gift
Fat fruit of incandescence
sphere of peeled silver.
A world of soft collusion
moonlight’s architecture.
Ambition faded and rage
become luminescence, slid
inside things so they shed
the burnt skin of what goes
day by day. Start breathing.
Catch moon, the last boat out.
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to Protected 5
Oscar set sail in his glass church with most
of his precious belongings inside without thinking
a solid glass church is not equipped to walk on water.
Several days later Lucinda was spotted on an outback reef
appearing regal behind glass and sure footed
as she stared at the intensity of her own rainbow-like reflection
mirrored off the water,
a calming image she offered in Oscar’s remembrance.
The note pinned inside her aquarium-like container essentially read:
"What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
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for trout never use doors
Ever since they quit swimming upstream and stopped traveling in schools
the trout from Richmond Point have a new lease on life;
dandy as it may seem to have access to their own private aquarium
the idea of walls that reflect shadows and display art
appeals to the head of most households and juggling a family of three
bequeaths a corner of one’s own in times of tributary entry.
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Pythagoras believed in numbers,
that all things consist of finite
numbers:
two unequal sides
always equal one other
i argue that suffering through broken
love is infinite, and although Euclid-like
in its construction, never adds up
tis’ true that although throughout history
love has been bisectional, intersectional:
consider a walled river, slow green water,
flat gravestones, an unscheduled
hurricane, or a birdhouse with wings
it’s been only recently,
when she forever went
out our rectangular door,
past our geometrically designed
red brick walls & down our parallel
sidewalk & crushed rock drive,
i cried
proving real mathematics
is nothing more than a flawed
navigation by metaphor
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I walk out of the nun’s cemetery past their labyrinth
with its spiral paths one can enter and leave.
The old ones were right. You can’t leave a faith.
It smolders in you, a fire beneath the ruins.
tune the bones the body sings
quiet the mind the spirit hums
How come we are told there
are no Gods and how come
we still look knowing they
will surface because we feed them?
watch the shore as slivered tree stumps
filemot driftwood shivers alive
Shouldn’t there be a name
for those who wander
from atrium to atrium
for the ones who know better
for the ones who get hooked
when they are too young to object?
they lift their heron wings and fly.
Frontenac, MN
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for trout never use doors
It is four a.m. and night is
dreaming of sunnier days
and toes dipped into this river
that splits the continent in two
where we met on its east bank
slipped out of shoes and let her
muddy and chill our feet.
When I think about you
I see starfish, all arms
and reaching.
When I think about you
I long for a field of corn
eight feet tall & like your
eyes, so easy to get lost in.
When I think about you
I feel like flying, letting
go of this earth, gravity
defied, I’d soar to you.
This morning a spider
has spun her web outside
my front door. I step into
it and am caught
in its beauty.
Trout never use doors
Rivers flow anyway
they please. Locks do not
want keys, prefer instead
when love slips in
and says hello.
This river’s banks are steep
and about to crumble
but we climb them anyway,
in search of sun and dappled
shade, soft grass, & a place
for us to lay our bodies down.
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So what is this? An animal
split wide open to reveal
the blue gut that functions within?
I once saw an antique sofa.
Velvet, the owner said, running
her hand over the upholstery.
To protect it, a horse hide throw.
I touched it: Not as coarse
as horse hair. Fake.
I'd touched trees, too. Not
enough of them to be a forest.
I saw its river, a blue canal.
Navigate it through the woods.
If you’re lucky, your god has wings
and a house for a head you can crawl
into for comfort. There’s one,
too, coursing the narrow strait
that flows from north to night.
Grandfather the sky offers derision.
Why are you marrying this? he asks.
Are there no other clouds left?
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for: Perpetual Gift
I thought I left the moon behind,
but, in my mind, her image stayed:
silver, frayed in countless beams,
like dreams to fill my day, my night,
my inner sight——come night, come day——
a painful way of seeing you
through brightest dew——the salty kind.
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for: Perpetual Gift
What I want is words
words you adore,
that get your attention
words that whip and rouse
and flare you, captivate you
then linger on your tongue,
words you’d buy a drink
charm, beguile and flirt.
Words you’d ask to dance
and ask to dance again.
Words you’d take home
spend half the night
exploring, playing with
the sounds they make
as your hands trace each line,
each curve and how they move
when you have them on your lips,
the other half studying them
as they sleep, with nothing
but the moon to illuminate
their meaning, with nothing
but your heart breaking, making
room for each one of them.
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rain, then a dangerous happiness
consisting of puddles and warm white
solitary coffee, a folded newspaper,
and sipping beautifully
her gown, an extension of her skin
and you with two free hands
unveiling an oil painting showing yesterday
and the artist contemplating
Blanche DuBois three months before
her Desire arrived
intertwined within three fir trees,
a lifetime of driftwood
far removed from honest lake water,
a thin place & a night owl |
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The day you filled the palm of my hands
with your tears, I felt strangely
at peace; there was nothing for me
to say, no moves for me to make; the transfer,
of your past to my transient human vessel
was clear, like the impression of rain on glass
like the willingness of aspens to sing
with the slight blow of wind; never,
not even at birth, had water breached
the barriers of skin and soul so throughly;
that was then, my dear;
from my window now, I see
the private Greyhound
that often carries us out of ourselves,
the empty coffee pots on the desks, the piles
of tomorrow's lives to complete,
the murky necessity of rest, among the moments
we forget to spend together. That peace I found,
that day you filled the palm of my hands with your tears,
was of time in the absence of itself; of time, of us
in the presence of ourselves.
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for years, our man wrote
soft strokes, swelling
his white pages
with poetic gratitude.
finally awarded a doorway
to greatness by two white
birch trees and a half-
arced rainbow,
our man soon realized
he had been abused
by a disloyal syntax.
promising future
acknowledgment
to the grayest of
of twisted driftwood,
he slowly drifted
into oblivion, following
two low flying
Canadian geese. |
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With the guts of the Mississippi heaving, I saw you inside the gulley. You were not the mud, but the footprint the water had left there; not the tear of the treeroot from the earth, but the tangled vine floating and speechless, never to tell its own story.
Yes, I remember the house. It wasn't just for the birds -- chipmunks came there too, searching for a place less tenuous than a thin branch. Some stocked their acorns there; others hid the scrolls of their foremothers. All were surprised that when the fires came, the house sprouted wings, and lifted us up.
We could sense it was the river below . We wanted to sooth the house, but it was crazy on its own trail, drunk on the air that pushed it fore and aft. We wanted to call out to the river, but it had so many names, and by this time, we didn't know if we were in Arkansas or Missouri, Ohio or Minnesota. If you call a river by the wrong name, it will turn away A from you, and then how will you ever drink again?
And then suddenly: You. The first thing I said, the first thing saw. A scrap of solidity in the slow pull of water. A name I knew, and a home unlike this one, but the same. The house remembered You, too in that moment -- how you had called all of us to never shut our ears. We careened northeasterly, and headed downwards.
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For Perpetual Gift
Please, fly with me
to the highest branch.
I want to suckle the moon,
swallow its vision of starkness
and learn the secret of
how it influences tides,
teaching seas to dance.
I have grown in darkness,
nested in odd fairy-light,
wild and divine,
born of dead sky-gods.
Up so high, we land softly
and when the clouds burst
instead of hiding in leaves,
we raise our cheeks,
letting it paint ours faces
with tear-streaks that drip
down below into languid pools.
Then despite the weather,
despite the loneliness
hovering in stormy sky
and the urgent drums of thunder
and because of the crazy lure of moon
lighting your face with love
I sing to you enchanted
the ancient music of my kind.
My paean trills in song
what my heart can only flutter
that I want to be to you always
the way rain on the ground,
luminous and alive in moonlight,
soaks away the disappointment
of grass browned by bitter sun.
But after the shower ends
misting into a sweaty love-heat
you leave me anyway
flying away with the memory
of once being so high
we drank from the moon.
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How can a worker toil,
come home, and begin
the other life?
It's possible, entirely,
when outlet is required,
that, no matter how tired,
pen, grasped between thumb
and finger,
begins to flow with things
that wait in dark lakes
below workaday surface.
I had a dream, once,
where rivers of ink
flooded brains in communion.
They communicated together
on ethereal circuits.
Sparks, embers,
memories blended
in the universal maelstrom.
It felt good to dream
like that, even
with the waking to toil.
And I rose,
hissing like a turtle,
armoured with dreams,
to crawl slowly
through another day. |
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protected 5 made me think
He was seen as a masochist meanie
for when swimming he shunned the bikini.
Instead, he took pains
to be padlocked in chains.
Have you guessed it? They called him Houdini. |
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for: Protected #5
It no longer makes a noise
as it falls, just as cars drive by
the heightened sound of wheels on asphalt.
Every leaf on every tree hangs heavy
with waxy beads of rain. The ground is swollen,
the air can hold no more moisture, no more sound.
Rain falls for the third day running, as I wait
for the call to tell me you will be alright.
I sit, motionless, breathe in the damp air
that carries no scent of you. Wrap my arms
around my body and try to remember
the way you held mine.
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to the photo reyes de magica
Queen of Diamonds
She sings, Magician. Shaman. Lover. Sun god:
take this my heart and slay me into
song.
She chants, Did you see how willing I am to
kneel at your feet? Did you see me
rise? Did you see how I have unfurled
my wings?
She pleads, Tell me a story. Toss me a card.
Read my palm. Turn black into doves.
Turn this world into a blushing bride and mold our
vale of tears into chalice
and sword.
She whispers, You know what I am talking about:
magic, ritual, slight of hand, metamorphosis.
I am the woman sawn in half. One half
is you and the other is
a key to a secret chamber.
She leans closer and offers her palm, Open.
Enter at your own risk.
Abracadabra.
Gone!
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Shallow
A hush covered the crowded blind over the Platte River at sunset. We all hid behind scarves and coat collars trying to stay warm on a chilly March evening. I watched each person adjust their cameras and scopes toward the river while we waited for the Sandhill Cranes to appear on the horizon.
Three hundred thousand Sandhill Cranes converge on this seventy-five mile portion of the Platte every spring on their way to northern summer nesting grounds stretching from Minnesota and Montana to the Arctic Circle.
I traveled to Nebraska, along with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people who converge on the Platte River every spring to witness the crane migration.
We heard the birds first before we could see them out of the skinny windows. An ancient-sounding loud, rattling kar-r-r-o-o-oooo. Then another.
I first spotted the black line of birds at the orange horizon after a red-capped pair landed and danced a half-mile upriver.
“Here they come,” a woman said.
“Do they land close to this blind?” another asked our guide without taking her eyes away from the scope.
“If we are very quiet,” he said in a barely audible whisper, “they roost in the shallowest parts of the river and we’re right next to a very good roosting spot. That's why they like the Platte. It's a wide, shallow river. They like shallow.”
Camera clicks interrupted conversation as the first dozen birds found their roosts on the center of the Platte near the first two. Dozens then hundreds more join the cacophony. Both the uncountable numbers of birds and also the increasingly rattling chorus kept our attention and our cameras clicking.
“Damnit,” one man said.
I jumped.
“I’m getting these great pictures but they’d be greater if the cranes would come closer,” he said with a sneer on his face.
I thought maybe the cranes don’t like that sort of shallow. |
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It takes two ideas to make a poem:
The blue bird house flies
down the channel
on the happiness of owls
which we can never know.
We know that sunlight can ignite
head and wings, that the voice
of wind connects us to water turned
the color of collared doves.
It is listening to wind
that twists the birches,
makes them young women
winged, almost in flight.
The keening is outside and inside,
tastes of dark cottages
rosary beads clacking,
low pubs with fires
the way the ancient beech
is a sculpture—torso, legs
of a woman—
Klimdt saw a vagina there,
I see round knobs for knees,
torso stretched, legs slammed
into earth, cast off, cast out
owls and oaks are stories
old women tell.
Every act of making unmakes.
the wind that connects the wing
and the shadow beneath
casts out over the river, catches
releases, all of it, here and not.
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for: A Thin Place
Daylight nudges me with golden fingers
my body, a rock, wants to lie in this bed
let the day wash over me, but for the bright
and the breeze that whispers to me
get up
Dew bends and clings to each green blade
like slumber clings to me. I walk my dog down
our quiet street, can hear each of her nails
touch concrete, can hear each creak
of my bones, then it dawns on me
I am dawn
I am light and shadow
shifting heat, I jostle and prod, offer
you this world, the only one I know, made
of dragonfly wings and fallen petals, an elixir
of pollen, blood, dust and mud. I beat you
with my words, drench you in the rain of them.
I warm you with crimson rays and tangerine
streams that swell the sky. I offer
you this world of mine, with eyes wide open
I look at the sun, do everything I’m told
not to-- at least once.
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Meditation on Three Lines
Power lines cross
the branches of maple and oak:
The telephone rings, the computer
starts up with its opening chord.
We work through the night
by the light of its energy
and get ourselves
a cold beer to boot.
But the power of trees arises
from vast roots deep in earth,
The massive trunk lifts the branches
high into heaven, emissaries
of the gods who send cracks
of thunder and lightning
and as quickly turn their backs.
The trees stop shaking,
and return to the work
of cooling us in shade,
their branches shielding us
from fire.
Norita Dittberner-Jax
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for: Protected 1
i see myself as a
cluster of fragments
shards of pain
& experience
i’ve always wondered
how others see me
eccentric
enigma
elusive
all adjectives
i’ve heard before
i carry her suicide
on my back
& i’m strangely
connected to the man
who killed my brother
all my losses
overshadow
my gains
my street life’s
embedded
in my soul
i’m like a doe
fenced in
& pissed off
because i can’t run
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You east, I west,
Watched life flow
Eternal seconds
Beneath our span.
For the moment it was,
It was forever.
Ending was never,
Always there, always ours.
Winds blew between us,
Moonglow covered us like silk
On chilly nights, reflected
By hardened waters.
Looking in each other's eyes
In dance without movement,
Never touching, only wanting,
We see ourselves there still. |
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(for A Perpetual Gift)
some days i feel
i own the moon
and all it has
witnessed
and all i have
confessed
and there will
come a time
when i will lie
down beneath
white lilacs,
letting others
tell the real story,
simply, such as it is |
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One moment of failure
among billions of small seconds.
Unwittingly, you chose that moment
to travel by car. Concrete and steel
knew your fate better than you.
Then you were a kid again
jumping off the rocks along the St. Croix.
The river below alluring in the glint of sun
waving hard to you.
And you loved the plunge into silvery water
because the river was soft and cool with surprise
as your body, lithe and young,
rose to the winking light-dimpled surface.
Your face dripping in the heat
crazy with love for the moment
wanting nothing more
than to break open the water again.
So you climbed out and dived off the rocks
with the spring of lightning
and the splash of erupting volcano
into river where it all begins
and ends with such eternity.
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(response to the image of the river in Navigation by Metaphor and the latest catastrophe here in Minneapolis)
(My grandson traveled over that bridge 15 minutes before it collapsed.)
Close Call
the day started badly
she brought the child late because
she had a doctor’s appointment
he forgot the tools needed for the
job, had to turn around to pick them up
couldn’t find them where he had left them
arrived to the site, no one home at the
third ring, cell phone out of battery
time balanced on a tuning fork
and strings not matching the note.
No matter, take a break, longer than
expected wait at the café for the latte
then give up, exceeding anticipation
pick the boy up earlier than usual
turn right instead of left for some reason
and take the bridge straight onto home.
A roar behind them, upheaval of steel and bone
a rent in the very dailiness of
missed connections, missed
appointments, saved
by being at the all the wrong places
at the wrong times, circumstances,
obvious that fate
is how we live, blinders on
(thanking God all the way up the road
into the nightly news)
life-lines etched in river and rain
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i found you in the fields
and in the backroads
seventeen years after my birth
before i even had a drivers license
there were white walled cupboards
made out of the spit of work hours
and messages on post-it notes
and even more poverty
that christmas the people
at the school got together
and payed for our freedom
with a turkey and a foodshelf donation
and i almost cursed
face red and anger
billowing out of my skull
because i already knew that we were poor
and didn't need someone else
to tell me again
my friends were the bright eyes
even though i was tarnished inside
against religion and politics
more of an anarchist than i knew
and we all lived together
symbiotic in nature
the crushed and the pressure
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for: Perpetual Gift
She was held high
in the beaks of two ravens.
The All was the velvet
in wings and summer night.
She once was given
to the goddess of naming,
the one distributing roles
like mother, guide, host.
Insooth, the moon
is the hole made by the sky
each night, the space
ravens fly through at dawn.
Tomorrow the weather
will be dangerous. Great
winds will arise and a blue
shawl will cover the earth.
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The calming glow of the water signals a tranquil reprieve,
A moment of pain, but a lifetime of ease.
Upon the dry grass my feet still burn,
I cannot feel my heels pulse and bleed.
The coolness refills my every vein,
I have not confessed, not one thing.
As I sink further into my greatest escape,
The feeling of sorrow hangs over my head.
This was not for me to erase my sins,
I must start walking all over again.
For I must earn my passage to enlightenment,
And never forget why I stopped to cool my feet.
To come so close and to then realize,
I have only begun to see my true path in the light.
There will be a place on this Earth for me some day,
I must keep walking or I will regret my intentions.
To cleanse the soul, is to stop the sting.
It all must come, it all must bring.
The humanity to begin where others left off,
And the wisdom to know just when to stop.
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it’s a dust bowl friday
a train whistles & rumbles
from the other side of town
a southern wind
blows sand in my eyes
a honey dew moon
peaks through
a crackle clouded sky
teasing me
teasing us
with thoughts of rain
i plead with the sky
i know it’s raining
out there somewhere
up there somewhere
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I would like to thank everyone who showed up for last night's reading for contributing to a very successful program. Now, don't thank me -- this just keeps me out of trouble. If it weren't for you folks I'd have to channel my latent energies elsewhere, and who knows where that might lead. It was overwhelming, beyond all expectations; in both the variety and the quality of the presentations. We actually heard from 16 readers. Amazing. Ed and Gerry are phenomenal hosts; and what a superb location. Ed has invited us to return on a monthly basis, and if he has any more of that good Chianti left in his cellar, I might be tempted to take him up on it. Let's ping pong that idea around and see where it bounces. I say go for it.
Starting Sunday evening, the subject/prompt/stimulus will be the bridge disaster. I'll post a photo, but I think we all know what it looks like. Some of us have already written about it. As always, any writing about anything will be appreciated. The bridge collapse is unique, because it has affected people in ways that were unforseen. Maybe you have heard "things like this don't happen in Minnesota," and the stoic "it just goes to show ya, when it's your time....," or "..people in Minnesota, we're tough.." among other quotes. There is shock, there is denial, there is symbolism and metaphor. There are a lot of emotions and ideas flying around, and a need for good writing, and for healing.
There also seems to be a preference for the State Fair as an instigation towards creativity. That will be the next topic. There, you're set for the month. That, and the remaining universe of wavelengths, echoes, psionic tethers, or whatever you want to call them. Don't ask me, I just work here. -Britt
(feedback via comments encouraged)
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She skims the meadow, feet just inches above the soil, as grasses
brush her soles.
Each pebble-germ of seed, blade, auricle, hair of ligule, whiskery corona
gives way beneath her
to reeds, hollow sippers drawing river, bending her
upstream
where a fisherman casts in the whitewater cleft her heels leave, until
fields rush
north on either side of the motionless water leaving her behind to hover,
descend,
to an obstinate rock—its contours fit each instep—that anchors the current.
It’s not
the rock that brings her down but the downdraft of enormous wings, the ones
she lost bright feathers from.
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