finalists!

Joanne's poem "Auto Biographies" is a a finalist in this month's Goodreads contest (winner selected by group vote).

My poem "The Season So Long" is a finalist in unFold's Garden Show.

Shabbat shalom!

ghazal, beaded with sweat

(A very rough, of-the-moment draft [as is the case with most of the poems posted directly to this journal] -- inspired largely by Luisa A. Igloria's Ghazal, Beaded with Rain; most of the link-phrases in stanzas 8-10 come from elisem's current jewelry sale)

Spending Shabbat with thoughts of Ali, from whom I learned the shape of these lines:
a teacher I never met, whose lessons I keep revisiting.

Ali died too young -- as does everyone, no? Although we haven't met,
the reaper is a teacher whose lessons I keep revisiting.

109 degrees today: a record in my city.
And yet I've felt such heat before, in memories worth revisiting.

The blues and greens of your lizard: see-through, yet so solid,
yet shining -- so cool to the lens, yet warm with the sun's visiting.

Rolling scraps of rejection slips into paper beads:
a lesson from my parents. In crafts, the past comes visiting.

The lizard sleeps on top of a shoe, her dreams laced with the soothing
burble of green-scented rain -- a crown of clouds a-visiting.

The taste of too-old ice cubes spoiling a glass of tea,
darkening the summer's day: All things are merely visiting.

Dawn scene with thunder lizards: a slice of a favorite morning
cool on the palm you hold to my cheek -- a variant in your visiting.

Feeling under my fingers the shine of the the painter's comforts:
aging threads momentarily silver -- the moon's light come visiting.

I am the summer's keeper, and you are a dreamer of dreams --
o, do not forsake the world on my watch. Just tell yourself you're visiting.

The heat will leave you moved and shaken, even as it turns you into stone
and then back into water, and from water into breath. To leave, you must keep visiting.

Breathing. Melting. Burning. Keeping.
Scorched pegs fall out of holes -- a lesson I'm revisiting.