The Sunday Poem: May Storm, La Parguera
“It never rains in sunny La Parguera.“
Every Sunday I post an original poem.
Poems often change a lot over their lives. Sometimes, they get better, and sometimes they get worse. Sometimes you revise sense into them, and sometimes you revise sounds, or beauty, or imagery. Sometimes, the sense of them inverts, changes, or just grows more mysterious over time.
This particular poem, I have two radically different drafts of. One of them made it into the (unpublished) book that was my thesis to get my MFA. The other was written during my undergrad years. They are both about the same place and the same theme, and even use some of the same language, but they don’t say the same things.
Today she walks on solid ground, but once
The world was water, every touch a wave,
And all her friends were mermaids, shelled and sleek.
Read More “The Sunday Poem: Out of Water”
The following is a true story from my childhood in Peru, except that the incident didn’t happen near the Nazca lines — I don’t recall if it happened on a trip to Ica or just out in the desert on the outskirts of Lima.
When I was a kid, after my parents divorced, my dad worked on a commune in Massachusetts called Montague Farm. This was the real deal: a working farm where I first saw chickens get their heads chopped off, where I first (and last) picked spinach in the sun, and also where there were blond girls named Sequoia running around and piles of anti-nuke comic books sitting on the end tables. My favorite featured a three-legged frog. If anyone has a copy, let me know.
Read More “The Sunday Poem: Housebuilding Near Montague Farm”