Announcement: Skylark and "Sculpting a Face"

The Winter 2016 issue of Skylark, an English-language tanka journal edited by poet Claire Everett, is available for purchase. I'm happy to say that reviews and features editor Jenny Ward Angyal interviewed me for that issue. Several of my tanka, many of them previously posted here at twigs&stones, including "silhouettes," are featured. Check it out.

silhouettes

we made of ourselves

in grade school …

how many know me

only by my profile

Columns of smoke

columns of smoke

rising from a distant field    

……..the signals

I fail to decipher

on the clearest of days

—Frameless Sky, issue 3

And for those who celebrate this holiday in the U.S.:
H A P P Y  T H A N K S G I V I N G !

Tanka Prose

The Singer

For years, I couldn't remember its name—that tasteful little nightclub tucked away from the bustle of shopping and restaurants. Intimate. Nothing ostentatious, simple wooden tables. Dark but not too dark. Safe but holding a measure of intrigue. Meant for people like me.

The resident musician sang and played nearly nonstop, curled around his guitar as if he were bound to it. (I rarely ever saw him stand up.) The song selection: whatever was popular back then, mellow but not too mellow. Notes and voice hinting of warm butterscotch.

An unlikely friend of mine with exotic island looks once spoke of him with an air of familiarity. "You know him?" I asked, as if he were a god and I a mere mortal-girl. "Sure," she responded between characteristic long drags on her cigarette. Of course, she and I lived in different lanes.

Fast forward: In time, the name of the place would come to me. Then, after a computer search to learn about its fate, I would stumble across the singer's name; another search would instantly yield current-day photos of him. In mere minutes, I would learn that he had landed himself on a list of registered sex offenders and, also, that he had been deemed a man of God, though I had no way of knowing which label had come first.

among shadows

at the trendy bars

I'd sit hoping

some young man would find me

yet hoping he wouldn't

_____________

The tanka "among shadows" was previously published in Landfall: Poetry of Place in Modern English Tanka, 2007.

Ragweed grains

ragweed grains

carried on autumn wind ...

not all things

that arrive at my door

do I welcome with grace

—Eucalypt, 20, May 2006

These old dishes

these old dishes 
crazed with spidery veins— 
the "good china" 
saved for special occasions 
few and far between 

—A Hundred Gourds, 5:2, March 2016

The thin ring

the thin ring
she won't let anyone
remove …
even though she's long past
recalling its history

—American Tanka, August 2016: Issue 27

Holes; I smooth

holes 

in the ceiling and floor—

my father

still clings to the walls

of the family house

—Ribbons, Fall 2015

I smooth

soothing gel on his skin

…...the rash

of old-age uncertainty

more difficult to quell

—Ribbons, Spring/Summer 2016

The sale of the house is scheduled to conclude next week!

Tanka Prose

Genus Dianthus

In my hand, a memento I consider purchasing from the little shop at the botanical gardens. "Do you know what flower this is?" I ask. The kindly man at the desk seems eager to help me. "Hmm, it appears to be a pink. Not all pinks are pink, you know; some are red, for instance," he offers. "And are you aware that the name pink comes from pinking shears—the serrated edges similar to the edges of the petals?"  

(Can't say I am. Ever-the-novice gardener, I don't even realize at this moment that I have variously colored clumps of pinks, which I have only ever referred to as Dianthus, in front of my own house.)  

I putter around the shop a little longer. Then the man shows me a page in a thick reference book, enthusiastically pointing to an illustration that bears a resemblance to the petite flower on this souvenir. "Look!" Before I leave, back to my life far away from shaded trails and lush displays of flora, I remind myself that attentiveness like this doesn't exist just anywhere.

painted

by a local artist

a dish so small

it holds nothing

but a memory

—Haibun Today,  Vol. 10, Number 3, September 2016

_______________________

The location: Asheville Botanical Gardens.