Poem Response on Vox Poetica

Here’s a poem I wrote in response to a photo prompt on Vox Poetica, a photo called Alberta Bound by photographer Michael Lee Johnson.

Mind

Stopped by the gate, you pace the place old
wheels have smoothed, tracks so worn

that’s all you see, never mind the fact
they cross over, go on. You believe

in the gate, though your lips shape
other words. Your hands trace the rubbed

wood, paint peeled—listen, you may as well
leave it here. There’s a way out that’s everywhere—

see how the sky goes around and through? Despite
the signs, forgiveness is the usual procedure: an inch

per century pushing up through plates.
The pace isn’t what’s important here. Out

in the estuary the same light grows, seeds
ripen and shake: little fists opening.

I love the tagline for Vox Poetica: “It’s just poetry. It won’t bite.”

I wrote this poem as part of a 30 day poetry challenge I’ve undertaken this August with a friend and fellow poet, and it’s helping me reaffirm that creativity is there in abundance. I don’t have to ration it or fear there won’t be enough. There is plenty there, and plenty of places and people to share it with.

Try writing a poem to a photo prompt from Vox Poetica, Rattle, or the 20 day poem challenge coming up at Ekphrastic Review.

Writing About Climate Change

Here’s a letter I wrote for Dear Earth With Love, a collaborative community chronicle of personal stories about climate change.

My dear friend Jo created this project. I encourage you to write your own letter to the earth, responding to your personal experience with climate change. It could be a letter, poem, story, song, or spoken word piece. It could be a video of a dance or performance; a painting, collage, or sculpture. Whatever medium suits you best, use it and make something– then submit your work.

Dear Earth With Love holds rolling submissions, with a deadline posted every few months. The next deadline is August 31, 2016.

Read the beginning of my essay here:

Continue reading “Writing About Climate Change” →

On Kristin George Bagdanov’s poem “More Strange” at Image Journal

Angel_Statue I just started writing short introductions for Image Journal‘s weekly online feature Poetry Friday.

I love these assignments because they introduce me to new work and new poets, they get me engaged with a journal I love, and they get me thinking– not just about my craft but about my faith.

Especially the poem I recently read and wrote about.

Kristin George Bagdanov’s poem “More Strange” is a compact powerhouse of emotion and complexity. I’ve been thinking about it a lot these past few weeks, moving through some heavy sadness over the brokenness of our world, while simultaneously beginning to wean my 14-month-old. I’ve been feeling weighed down by the violence in the news and grappling with my vulnerability, wanting to protect my child from what I have so little control over. It’s easy to forget God’s sovereignty and providence. It’s all too easy to imagine that grief and pain have the last word.

So this poem has helped, and I’m so grateful when poems help. To me, this too feels like a small sign of God’s living presence– that art heals, that humans can be conduits through which healing can flow. It makes me grateful that I write, that God planted the seeds of an abiding interest in poetry when I was very young. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!)

Bagdanov’s poem is about the most intense grief I can fathom– Mary’s loss of her son– which becomes so much more than human grief, through the mystery of God’s saving grace.

Read Kristin George Bagdanov’s poem at Image Journal here.

Image: By MarcusObal (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

Janet McCabe Poetry Prize

RUM_40_Cover_large

In late June, I learned that my poem “Yellow” won the 2016 Janet McCabe Poetry Prize at Ruminate Magazine. The poem will be published in the September 2016 issue.

Ruminate is one of my favorite publications, and its arrival in my mailbox is one of the small but great pleasures in my life.

It’s beautiful. It’s print. It still comes in the mail. And it’s quarterly, which means several months of anticipation between issues– a novelty in an age when it seems we hardly have to wait to read anything anymore.

I love how each issue takes shape around themes in a life of faith that sometimes go under-explored. I love the visual art it has brought into my life. Though my sister is a talented visual artist, and I always feel enriched on a different level when I make space for it in my life, I confess that I just don’t make that space on my own. So the magazine is a good reminder to make the time.

Continue reading “Janet McCabe Poetry Prize” →