Brynn, that's great news!

Will you post a poem here?

t I'll-show-you-mine I just finished my end-of-the-semester portfolio:

FOGGY POEM

I am tired of the incandescence of your smile. The air
near me is heavy, humid, wallpaper curling around

the edges and stones in the garden gleaming
wet. Six days of rain and I can feel my

humor wearing through with touch; my patience gumming
from the persistent fogging of your breath.

The sun is down for the count. I am riveted by your voice, the heat
of your hands, the new grass growing on the lawn.

Soft shoots of green. You brush my hair:
your clever fingers seeking out my knots.

Time-elapsed picture: I can't
break out. My knife's a smile, my body's spent.

The rain returns. The blade is sharp.
I click my fingers. Step away.

(That's an intentional two-line stanza break between "your breath" and "the sun is down".)

t skippet-y hop

I'm going to read on the radio again! It's a Mother's Day-themed show that will air next Sunday night (which is Mother's Day).

I wrote a very sweet piece reminiscing about my Mom when I was a kid. However, they need me to add to it, because they're short on writers. So. We tape Monday afternoon, which means I have the weekend to flesh out my piece.

I'll post it here when I have something, so I can have some trusted eyes see it before I read it.

Yowsa, Steph!

Liz, this:

The air near me is heavy, humid, wallpaper curling around the edges and stones in the garden gleaming wet.

is exquisite. It becomes doubly so on the level of immediate emotional engagement; I'm looking out my window at the garden, where a night of fog and scattered rain has left small pools, and Puff Mama, an orange and white longhair, is picking her way over wet bricks on the path down below with a look of disgust on her face.

That piece talks to me.

Wonderful news, Steph!

And while poetry isn't my realm of expertise, I think you have some lovely evocative imagery there, Liz.

My favorite part is the first line, but the whole image is beautiful, Liz.

Brynn, that's great news! Will you post a poem here?

Of course. That is as soon as I can dig up an edited copy. I know most of ''Unwritten'' by heart but a friend and I just ammended some line breaks before it goes to the final stages and print prep begins, so I'll have to dig into my school account to pull up the edits. Pretty sure I can do that using Telnet, but I will wait until my SO calls me here tonight so I don't mess-up my stepbrother's comp in the process.

Thank you, deb, and Susan and erika.

(That poem kicked my ass up and down the street for six months. I'm still working on the next-to-last stanza, which does feel mostly as though it's just treading water.)

Wow, six months. I don't work at poems much, if I don't like it the way it first presents, I'm likely to abandon it.Maybe it's a leftover self image issue. Or possibly a good argument for not having kids in the next few years.

I write virtually no poetry anymore, but when I did, I generally wouldn't read it for a few years after it was done. That was deliberate. You look at something five, ten years down the line and bits of you want to change this or that, and it's a sensational way to mirror the you that was with the you that is.

I've been to poetry readings and waited after to buy a copy of the writer's work and/or have it signed. Several times the poet would flip to a certain page and change a line--cross out the printed line and write the "corrected" version in--before signing. I don't think a poem is ever necessarily "done."