Poetry and Prose

The kitchen staff all have their backs to the door, gathered like a bouquet garni, one seeped in the scent of Lynx and Gillette

~ Bust 1998 (Flights, Issue 2)

Because one ghost’s never enough

we’ve a second who comes on Tuesdays

and it happens several times a week

~’Just Like My Sister – After V.C. Andrews’ (Pink Plastic House)

And on that bed there was a girl

and on that girl there was a man

~ ‘Maypole ’94’ (The Daily Drunk Wickerpedia anthology)

Moi soul uz bin liftid.

Moi spirit rejoysis in moi Creeyata

~ ‘Magnificut’ (Tears in the Fence, issue 74)

our bodies gibber and cuff

chord of the full moon.

~ ‘Songs of Flesh’ (Flights, issue 1)

galaxy girl feels

the mysteries she’ll live

ignite her milky bones.

~ ‘a spell for galaxy girl’ (Coven Poetry, issue 2)

my deep face

deep inside, still

covered in darkness

~ ‘Like the First Bird’ (Allegories and Analogies, issue 4: Rejuvenation)

…It’s like the binary code is failing…heh ;)…

The rd worms are uot in force

~ ‘at home/ at work’ (Streetcake, issue 72, part one

I can’t run from me

when the word and the sea make

more of me. Everywhere me.

~ ‘Let Santa Teresa Guide You To The Mystery’ (Nymphs, April 2021)

We greatly multiple the joy in conception. Still, my desire is for myself. My body, it flames.

~’Apocrypha’ (Cape Magazine, Issue 2)

I shed my body

love dances out

~ ‘slowly, then all at once’ (Pages Penned in Pandemic)

You find yourself in the forest heart beating in your

thigh old wound gaping black red

~‘In Our Lady We Trust’ (Mooky Chick, September 2020)

Somewhere a sluice gate of love

has b u r s t

filled us with

blood love the same

~ ‘t h e s u r f a c e’ (Streetcake, issue 68, part one)

Dust falls like ash. Crows roost in the crotches

of fig trees. Now I’ve given my all

away there’s nothing. He must go back.

~ Calypso, On Shore (Black Flowers, Volume 6)

on midnight stone, I waited too long

for him to run back to me, I turned

too late to grasp him in slow hushed heels.

~ ‘(I Blame) My Shoes’ (Magma 37)

Podcasts

Spell work and magic for healing is one way that I use and create poetry. This leads as well into how I use poetry to examine my own moral failings and culpability. Not to self-flagellate in a way that my catholic upbringing attempted to train me for, and not even just to ruminate about blame in personal relationships. What I’m really excited about in writing poetry right now is to use it to examine how I benefit from power structures.

~ Eat the Storms (Episode 5, Season 3)

Essays

What is the delicious pull of caregiving and why am I going to miss it? … the shadow side is the compulsion to feel needed, and the emptiness that brews when there is no one around who makes me feel needed in that way.

~ Empty nester: who will I be without dependent children? (Jumble and Flow)

I’ve a clothes buying confession to make. The things that I love most in my wardrobe are those things that are now. My heart chooses the novel over longevity every time…so to balance my heart anf my conscience I choose to buy second hand.’

~ Textile Message (Pieced Work by Clare Carlin)

Interviews and Readings

My writing has been an anchor in my life during the pandemic, as it usually is. It helps me to process and to heal in ways that I’ve found no substitute for.

Pages Penned in Pandemic Blog (March 2021)