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Category: Poetry

NYC Island Hopping:
Liberty Island 🗽

Miss Liberty is the sole draw of Liberty Island… and she’s enough. Though my love for oxidized green ladies is far and wide, she is quite special–both in stature and symbolism. And like many special ladies, she inspires poetry. Below, the most famous “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, written Read more…


The past, the future, majesty, love—
if they are vacant of you,
you are vacant of them.

I’m heading out… the road beckons. And I abide. It’s a magical place–one of immediate consequence, one where you are you in your most potent form. And she is a me I adore. A fact that can bring me to tears and has, followed by a giggle of my own Read more…


Parks & Rec: Brooklyn
Narrows Botanical Gardens

I walked to Bay Ridge’s Narrows Botanical Gardens for the third day in a row. But this time I planned to sit and write a poem. Setting my intention seemed like a plan I had with another. Like when I go to bed to hear the thunder from under the Read more…


Something About Airplanes, Part 2 ✈️

It always strikes me as odd that more people are not glued to the window during flights. How often can you see the beautiful Earth from the perspective of 30,000 feet? I’m always amazed how much like a quilt the land always looks, a quilt stained with enormous cloud shadows. Read more…


It’s like death in a way

in a way that there is nothing but loose ends I’d be living, still me extending a limb to reach for something in the cupboard and see one in the corner of my eye I’d find one pouring out from the granola the start of something left abandoned I’d be Read more…


The Great American Eclipse Preparation, Part 2: We are the Dreamers of Dreams

First: you know how you hear stories of people who try frying turkeys during Thanksgiving and cause an explosion? Or Meth producers who blow up their homes?  Like that, you risk catastrophic consequences if you go staring at the sun willy-nilly without protection–or looking through a camera without a solar Read more…


Will you give me yourself?
Will you come travel with me?

Though I generally resent most advertisements as trite emotional manipulation, I really love this Volvo ad.  But I credit Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road more than Volvo… and Josh Brolin’s voice as narrator. It captures the magic of being on the road, a beloved past time of mine. Further, Read more…


Chiaroscuro

I recently had to write the yearbook letter for my graduating 5th grade class. Though I love to write, in general–mostly because I’m not that great at speaking but always have a lot to say–the prospect of translating the internal world… to words… with a deadline is very daunting. I work Read more…


Abandoned:
Halcyon Hall/The Bennett School for Girls

Raising Statues to the Dead by Louis Daniel Brodsky From this grassy vantage where I sit, Watching students pass, in twos, threes And singly, through lilac and redbud hues, Like colors escaping a coruscating prism Or balloons lifting vertiginously, My shadow casts its stolid mass. The contrast between its static Read more…


Dia de los Muertos

For Joseph Henry Piecuch, 1979-2014 People can live in your mind–nourished, lively, protected from violent forces like time, distance, and reason. They bolster an assortment of ideas: Hope, love, fate. Woven to these forces and ideas, they become one, powerful and purposeful, an extension of yourself. And in return, they Read more…


♕ Fruit Poetry ♕ by V.V.

Imagine being the first to discover an orange accidentally piercing a thick, dull rind inventing a word to describe the burst a word to name the stickiness on your palms the stray rind in your teeth that tickles your tongue. Imagine the peachfuzz of a berry as a full-grown beard the blackberry’s Read more…


Vegan in The Bronx

While taking a botany class all-week at the gorgeous New York Botanical Garden, I thought it was fine time to do some blog reporting in the northern-most borough of New York City. The Bronx. The Bronx has a handful of vegan gems, mostly Rastafari-owned Ital counter spots/health food stores, that Read more…


Here Comes the Summer

Last day in May, the afternoon: remember? Black marks off charcoal from the dune: remember? I thought it wouldn’t be too soon; we’d wait at least until its June. The twenty-ninth of March it rained: remember? You looked so sad that I explained: remember? You knew it wouldn’t be too Read more…


Memorize a Poem: The Genius Of The Crowd

The Genius Of The Crowd [Charles Bukowski] There is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day and the best at murder are those who preach against it and the best at hate are those who preach love and Read more…


Happy Mothers Day

I am the Budgie Baby a parakeet in the kitchen You’re my eyebrows my need wipe down the table since the sponge is already wet He met you at a church dance I met you after 3 before barely making a peep I know the world of why in the Read more…


Summer of George: Cringe Reading

Like most adolescent girls, my transition into womanhood, in all its tumult, is well-documented in journals, early zines and within the violent cross-hatch of hardbound sketchbooks. I took my writing very seriously as I did each individual emotion born of the marked confusion of this epoch. My 14 year-old mind, Read more…


Cleopatra

I am used to being treated so not having to don the awkward weight of a jewel-crusted crown convey to you my color cut clarity succinctly directing your eyes to mine violently grasping, ocular assail you cross off my name in M.A.S.H. push me to a hidden place where i Read more…


Black, White, Red, All Over

he was in Iowa with us in all the nothingness in the dark the subtle horizon of corn fields light like a horror show he was in the air sandwiched between two semi’s our headlights illuminating his name him crawling out the grey holes alive again how we had knew Read more…


Handicapped

My constant and careful deliberations often sour sweet fortuity, clamp my moving parts Internal exertions, the push and pull of thoughts the psychic cardiovascular activities bring outward motion to a halt an imbalance that attaches me stationary like an innocuous post-it note You’ve grown accustom to overlooking the chalky yellow.


Simple Machines

I graduated from high school many years ago. Today I was contacted by a man who student-taught in my 11th grade art class. He attached a photograph of a piece of art I had completed under his instruction. I remember the piece well (a still life completed without lifting the Read more…


Dedicated All To Yous

I’d really like to see you again but only if by chance. Like in the chance of my remembering a dream. Last night I dreamt I was initiating a complex rescue effort for a young bound woman in the hold of some sort of water vessel. She had been sitting Read more…