What the Muses Leave Behind

“Our species is committing suicide – that is a choice…”        -- Terry Tempest Williams Death might be just a holy rend                      a stitch of good luck, a weeping of snow melt. How resurrection prefers dirty water and pain, I’ll never understand. Her instructions comprise                    a tiny storm of mercy– full of crows and bottle flies,                                                                to debride the corpse,                                         ...

-- Women's March first anniversary 2018 Crone privilege abides here in the steady pour of the Mississippi. Her laughter, belly deep, shadows grackles and gulls, her inconvenience, forever indentured with her shoals, and her easy is fickle, full of silt and minnows. Crone privilege abides here. Out of the modern drudge, we know these truths: Wisdom is love, love is patience, patience takes its time. On the shoulders of old women, it pushes boulders up a hill, Defying the Sisyphean habit – they will roll it up and over, be done with that. Crone privilege abides here. Call us queen bees, a riot of pussies, hand maidens over done. Maya Angelou made her heart into a mantra, now when we straighten our backs, the chrysalis splits wide, and like cream on whiskey              we rise.

Maybe you believe this land is a tamarind rind                                          or geode hide,                                  or conundrum stubborn. Maybe it reminds you of a sleeping old dog, growling and mean with dreams of glory days and the chase. These hills and muddy folds of dormant agriculture                                                                 never heard of Persephone. Even Eden is a piece of gossip since John Deere and Massey Ferguson. The b...

Long shadows of winter woods crosshatch the afternoon road. Sun strobing a windshield in strange Morse code, delivers, not so much an invitation, but a summons, the pull of growing light. Hip deep in such a year as this - never what we intended, askew in storm and surge, we walking dreams of grandmothers and fathers, swim with the avalanche of history at our back. Light as love, light as breath, light as legacy. It comes from deep in time, a tiny germ, a song we feared was lost, a turning point, a pivot, a catalyst. The messenger, a code of pulsing light among the trees, quickens us like the voice of multitudes heard as from a distance: Light as love, light as breath, light as legacy. Winter Solstice 2017 Rosalynn and  John Michael

don’t you love it          the way trees              trimmed                                                             under                                                           power lines get right back up                  to reach for the sky the severed limbs heal         how they send out               new wood                ...

My name is Paul Prince , and my mother is an addict.                               I cradled her Addictions              and a trafficked woman   from Ukraine my grandmother took her in                       our home     the sanctuary  shelter  haven of lost causes                                            Trafficked woman and I married       had three kids              and loads of piss and vinegar bickering        I’m an all-...

I go to my cushion, I sit with Iran Iraq, all shook up - 7.3, an inconvenient sanction, with catastrophe to break its back. I sit with red scarfed women, quiet as the dead - with their broken city, broken body, broken song. I sit with the ones who always will remember, forgiving my amnesia, preserving us like a peat bog, tar pit. I sit with my faucets of hot water and long showers, my own safe place, a lifetime of golden yolk, delicious. Under the same sky, I sit with ten thousand children toting five-gallon buckets, minding minefields and mortars. I sit with questions poking the soft soles of my feet. when I walk too fast they pop open and swallow me. I sit with dilemma, with a thready song, pretending that my fingers can touch the grief of red scarfed women. I sit in webs of hope, take notice of a pileated messenger, hammering away for the little things that deliver us. And when grace tips me on my head, I am an ocea...