Just a quick post to announce the Polar Vortex has iced the launch of The Curve of Her Arm scheduled for tomorrow night in Coshocton, at the Johnson-Humerickhouse Museum. Hope to reschedule soon!  In the meantime, it is still available for purchase by leaving me a comment here and I will contact you, or at NightBallet Press. 
​     After watching the birds gathering at the bird feeder today, I thought I'd share this winter poem with you:


Grackles
 
Two grackles descended on the feeder by my window.
The day was bitter, and the snow deep on this,
   their first visit to the establishment.
 
The finches flustered and blustered, most affronted by these leviathans.
The nuthatches honked up and down the trunk of a nearby maple,
And a lone chickadee cocked his head from a branch above,
     as if to say, “Who are these clowns?’
 
The grackles jumped and swung on the feeder like two wild boys on monkey bars.
Suddenly one paused, looked in the window, and - I swear – winked at me.
Then with a flash of midnight blue, the two flew off seed in beak,
Leaving me with monkey bar dreams of my own.
 
 

     After three years of work, this collaboration with my friend, Holli Rainwater, has finally come to fruition. I am thrilled to announce the publication of The Curve of Her Arm. The poems in this  collection published by NightBallet Press are inspired by the practice of qigong, an ancient Chinese practice incorporating body movement, breath, and mindfulness. 

     Holli and I want to thank Dianne Borsenik of NightBallet Press for her care in creating this chapbook, as well as artist Becky Hernandez for her gorgeous artwork. If you can join us at our reading on January 31, 2019, 6:30 p.m. at the Johnson-Humerickhouse Museum in Coshocton, Ohio, we would love to meet you. We will be sharing poems and some of the related movements. The Curve of Her Arm is also available from NightBallet Press ($12), from Holli, or from me (see the Contact page on this website). Future readings will be posted on this website. 

     We hope our poems will compel you to, as Holli writes in the introduction, "feel, in a visceral way, our kinship with everything else in the natural order", to "subtly change our way of being in the world."



(See my February 27, 2015 post for "Three Rivers Qigong", a poem included in this chapbook.)