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POETRY


Geodes
 
The poems in this collection examine what happens when we are cracked open by love, loss and the passage of time



Selected Poems:
 
“Thirst,” West Trade Review, Spring 2021, Volume 21

“What She Doesn’t Know,” The Wax Paper, Volume Three, Issue 11
 
“Q&A,” Evening Street Review, Mid-Spring 2021, No. 29
 
“They May Be Poppies,” El Portal Literary Journal, Fall 2020, Volume 78, No. 2
 
“Coda,” Drunk Monkeys, December 2017, Vol. 2, No. 12
 
“1305 Elm Street,” Gemini Magazine, March 2016

"Stone", Persimmon Tree, Summer 2017

This poem was the genesis for the poems in Geodes.
 
Stone

There’s complexity in stone.
Bird, fern, bark, bone
 
compress and carbonize to shadow.
So much of what we love

stiffens. My mother
hunted geodes in Iowa fields,
 
delighted in the prize inside—amethysts
deep as purple plums, agate
 
burnished nectarine.
My husband free-climbed cliffs,
 
clung to stone the way
to skin a lover cleaves.
 
I wear my mother’s agate ring,
sit beside my husband’s grave,
 
pink granite warm to touch,
gold flecked face of Annapurna
 
at sunset. In summer
I eat peaches, claret
 
cherries, bruised plums,
strip sweetness from stone
 
hearts, seed and cyanide
locked inside.
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