a poem of recognition — As a child, I lived in many houses, twelve in seventeen years. I was accustomed to turmoil, chaos and reorder, the rhythm of packing, carrying, unpacking all of my winnowed things. I am ever drawn toward containers: painted boxes, baskets, bowls, empty shells and fossils all with the capacity to hold beloved things…

Saturday Poetry Prompt: a borrowed stanza — I was going to ask about you, but between the sounds and the voice, the crow got the question and I am glad it rose up voiceless out of me, a shade, in wild silence, into barren branches to the crows and the startle-crows gave their warning, ringing down, sending glossy blue-black…

Take care. . . — If you go out when it is nearly dark because you remember the rich color to harvest before the coming frost — bright zinnias and Mexican sunflowers — watch for tiny sleepers. You may see a small dark body, just off-center in the deep saffron disk of a zinnia, take your time…

Saturday Poetry Prompt: out of thin air/into the shadow — Invited when the veil is thin and the dead can have their days, out of thin air, come the spirits into the shadow of our living, breathing bodies, or so says the lively, young baker, Aurora, who teaches us to make pan de muerto, bread for our dead, the dead…

Wednesday Prose Poem prompt (10/6): who do you see? — The Harbor of Your Voice I am tucked into the warm curl of your arm, ear on your heart, the resonant hum of your voice through your bones and flesh, my small vessel moored there — your voice a comfort, a harbor, gathered me to ground — the ground of…

Dennett’s Prompt: October is all about Orange — There is no better place to be in fall than the North Woods for the changing colors. The last 2 days of September and the first 3 of October, I had a treasured and rare long weekend away with my husband and both of our adult children and their partners…

On a weathered dock in growing light — Dancing in the space above the rooted, the starlings are one, rolling with life each little bird, receptive to each little bird, acting for the whole of them. See the graceful pair of turkey vultures, soaring higher than the trees? Together, they are braiding the air, their broad wings seldom move. An easy morning…

Wednesday prose poem prompt: scarification — The gray lines on my knee: gray from the dust of driveway gravel, still there after all these years, from an address that was only mine for two years of childhood. A big white rented farmhouse, where mom and I planted red zinnias and dad taught me how to ride…

Dead Poets Live Prompt: Into the Woods — On the weathered wood of a dock, just barely above the calm waters of the bayou, life rises around me in quickening sounds at the gloaming and again in the moments just before a hint of pink graces the east. Groups of Sandhills call to each other across the cattails, make…