I don't post a lot here though i like it here. But I am far busier than I would like to be and so I usually content myself with Facebook. Here's some news, in case I haven't said it here. I lost my position in the nursing program due to bad communication. I had everything in but thought the background check and the drug test I had submitted for earlier classes would suffice. They didn't. And it would be a simple matter to reapply but I only got a B/C+ in chemistry/ chemistry lab. I could re-take that but a matter of much more concern to me is that my joints, particularly my hands have developed what I think is either arthritis or rheumatoid arthritis just in the last semester so I don't feel confident i can do the work of a nurse. This semester I am taking no science classes (well, an Environmental Science lab, which consists of going to Catalina for 3 nights.....) I am taking Humanities, Interpersonal Communications, CIS, History and a poetry writing class. I am pretty happy! But I do need to figure out what I might be able to do to make a living.

I am particularly enjoying the poetry class. I have no illusions about my writing skills. I took the class because I miss thinking a way I used to, I used to think in poetry. I could never get it out right and I still can't but at least I am having some of those sublime-to- me moments again. I've been having such a need of beauty and simply to be!

I'm making some tacos now and they are starting to smell good, but I thought I'd share the poems I have written in class so far.

German Potato Pancakes Before Class

Standing in her sun splashed kitchen mood high and happy from the Scottish reels we chatter like morning birds. She lifts the little pan off the burner unconscious that she’s dancing Coincidence has made us friends, she’d left a broomschtick on the shuttle. Bought it in Germany, just the stick, and wrapped just so, and she wondered if someone might bring it to her The Teutonic music of her voice and those “ne’s” inserted here and there charmed me. “Where do you live?” I was hungry for the story of this broomstick from Germany. It took forever to find her house. She cautiously answered my ring but her eyes lit in radiant open blue wonder when she saw the flowers. “kommen” I think of Heidi- that after Johanna Spyri wrote her young adventures, she bounded off the page with a jar of milk and some goat cheese and just continued living. Only she is called Erika now- Her name means heather and she exudes an air of innocence and edelweiss.

She moves the pan back to the heat. I thought she’d forgotten it, but now she scrutinizes these potato pancakes- the color is not perfect yet. Catering for the big fancy corporations In Scarsdale New York may have honed her sense of “perfect,” but I think it was really the flowers she plonked into a vase when her flower- shop relative considered training her to his trade. His gentle suggestion -that she try something else. I can hear his regretful tone and feel her heart fall from half around the world and decades away. Now, in her sun splashed kitchen she is making me pancakes. She’s been up for hours grating potatoes. The table is all set, pretty and precise. She stores each pancake in the oven and when they all are finished She brings them to the table with a bowl of applesauce and we taste the crisp, tender perfection She has made for our breakfast.

In the Wake of Them


One black brown feather jutted up
teased by a breeze, it moved
as if that airy kiss might tempt the still form
to one last flight.

In winter grey brown grasses,
she numbered small, spotted corpses-
five beneath the tree and
peppered ‘round the ground
as if flung by some
discreetly violent predator,
gone mad with killing,
then quiescent in the morning frost

She filled a bag.
Black plastic crinkle sound,
the deposit of each stiff- soft starling body
received into its maw.
Each removal left a blank,
felt like a silent screaming vacuum

When they lived,
it never seemed this crowd
thronged within her fence at once.
She wondered at the area grown glutted

with gruesome manna.

Her eyes cast questions,

sweeping her perimeter,

taking in the somber yard art.

“Was the freeze as bad as that?”

Someone later told her
“They poisoned them.”
And, unlike me,

 she thought she felt better
at least knowing what happened.