Waxing Poetic

Literally.

You would think I have nothing to say.

But the opposite is true. I have too many things to say that I can’t seem to focus on a single topic.

It must be the encaustic fumes eating away at my brain cells. Or the arthritis knotting up my thumbs. Or my adult-onset ADHD.

Whatever it is, I have started and not finished at least four posts: one is about asking the second shift to take over for me in activism; one is about regret over not being a lesbian; one is about making encaustics; the other is about recurring sex dreams about a friend’s ex and the poem I wrote about it at least a decade ago.

Photo taken in April with my iPhone in Hampden off University Parkway.

These days, instead of sitting down to write, I go straight to the basement and make art. Today, I completed the third in a series of season-themed encaustics with poems embedded in them. I altered an old poem to fit the photo:

The fabric of spring

I wanted to write a sentence with verdant, wanted to use the word lush, wanted it fragrant in word only. wanted it wordy, wanted to roll in the word green, needed the stains of the word grass on the knees of the word jeans, but all day the wind shook the japanese cherries and yesterday’s blossoms have popped like a piñatafull of confetti, blanketing the word lawn with the word pink, a magic shag carpet. I listen for its breath, small jean genie, must of earth behind my ears, rolling,wordless, in the new-woven fabric of spring.

And that brings me to the point of this post. When I lost my job last June, I intended to finish writing a children’s book, work on the rest of a novel, and find a publisher for my full-length poetry manuscript, Words with Friends. I finally accomplished one of those goals.

Today, I’m able to share that my poetry book will be published by Meat for Tea Press! I’m so freakin’ excited!

And a little icing on the cake was finding out yesterday that one of my older poems made it into an anthology. It’s one of about 130 poems chosen from a total of 3,600 submitted.

More details are forthcoming.

So is the lesbian post.