Category Archives: Poetry & Prose

Poetry, verse, lyrics, sonnets, ballads, flash fiction, short stories, fables, aubades and serenades.

The Aunties

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A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of joining a Zoom gathering, hosted by GirlTrek that featured political activist and author Angela Davis and poet/activist Nikki Giovanni, who just made her earthly transition a few days ago on December 9, 2024.

The following poem is to dedicated Ms. Davis and the late great Ms. Giovanni.

auntie nikki

auntie angela

teachin’ preachin’

our whole lives

paving the way for

us black girls

ill-fitting in our

human suits

till we learned the magic

of words the power

in our hair the strut

in our stride the mama mojo

click of our teeth that says

I am here!

the aunties

paving the way

for our voices

& the songs

those voices

sing

Rest In Peace, Goddess Nikki, Poet Eternal

And to read my favorite poem by Ms. Giovanni: https://poetrysociety.org/poems/winter-poem

Cotton Candy

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in my mamas bosom

i would bury my eyes

wet with salty seas

and talk about how

rodney jones snatched

my cotton candy and

buried it in the sand today and

miss adams didnt

even do a thing like

make him sit in the

corner the way she

would do me when id

hit somebody and andy

white kissed me when i

wasnt even lookin and

mama would rock me

close with a rhythm

i knew well

and hum one of those

old familiar gospels

and read me an appropriate

passage from the scriptures

that i never quite

understood and when those salty

seas dried and trails of crust

decorated my face my

mama would wet her finger in her

mouth and cleanse me

again and that warm

silky moistness

would make me forget my lament and id

attach an extra thank

you at the close of my

prayers for the gift of

my mama

Threnody for a Leap Year

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As we are mere days away from another leap year, I thought I would re-post a poem of mine that reflects on our last leap year. Perhaps the world’s most infamous. Thanks for reading.

Before 2020 even arrived
I claimed for all to hear that it was going to be an auspicious year
One for the books
This is my modern habit
Claim it and it becomes truth
Or as the proponents of this idea say
It’s already truth and just awaiting your agreement
Clever that one
Whenever I am at the end of my tether
I cling to clever mystical ideas
One-One-Twenty-Twenty
A milestone birthday
I had just turned the same age as the year I was born
and a leap year to boot
A virtual bonanza of numerological magic

too luscious not to play with
Life has felt stifled for so long that
I’ve taken to making ridiculous claims
Not even certain I believe
but more than willing to be loud
A coming move
A new town
Resuscitation
Breathing room to be artful
to recover health and spirit
Say it loud and the world is yours
An unapologetic child’s belief in magic
where not much else matters
but my own contentment

And then an entire planet folded in on itself

A dying star in the midst of my own brilliantly sketched intersection of stars
I found myself positing with spit that the only use for a Klan hood
was to operate as a medical mask
A snark not nearly so absurdly cutting once I read of
a man in San Diego who did just that
For years I felt alien to my own race
A terrible affliction
Suddenly I was thrusting fist into air and shouting about Black Lives
Couldn’t NOT see my siblings’ necks under that knee
blood seeping from tear ducts like plastic Jesus tchotchkes
On the corner for $1.89 but you can always bargain
The threat of extinction nearer than the sun bleeding through
raggy human-stained ozone threads
When the phalanx of law enforcement swarmed protestors
and I watched from the anxiety-disordered safety of my flat screen
and was more fixated on who was social distancing and masking up
than on the power of protest
my brain seized the way a computer freezes and needs a moment to untangle
When death came and came and kept on coming
A party crasher who WOULD NOT LEAVE
Breaking the furniture and pissing on the carpets
When the pulverized bones of Black Lives, Asian Lives, Trans Lives
by lynch mobs and those enlisted To Protect and To Serve
When the pulverized lungs of those who did not survive ventilators
were blown by a restless wind
and the powder gusted and gathered
as airborne as this virus
dusting like topsoil the heads of a system committed to its status quo
because we led  (as we always seem to)  with privilege and hubris
and a baffling new war was declared: “to mask or not to mask”
a ghost town was erected in the place where
equitable society tried in futility to exist

And as pandemic-age babies were born
from mothers who risked safety to be in hospitals
and fathers not even allowed in delivery rooms
As they came into this life    into this collective terror of a country
that went and made itself pariah to the rest of the world
these babies were anointed with the ancestral coding to one day
thrust arms wide and take hold this earth
wresting it from a generation
that did not deserve it
Their wild infant hearts will one day make whole again
soil and sky and oxygen and humanity
They will claim it audaciously
An unapologetic child’s belief in magic

All I wanted to do was hit sixty and be fabulous
Party a little too hard and do the next-morning walk of shame
with the straps of my resale Steve Maddens in my teeth
Instead I keep skimming back over this hope
of the consecrated newborn
taking over this world
but have found it hard to find its pulse
without losing breath
And that very thought
feels an insult to the memory
of George and Breonna and Elijah
but I gear up     strap on     start my way
through an untilled jungle
ready to be one in the revolution
even leaning in just a bit for the rending of thorns
against bare arms
The tiniest symbol of atonement
for all my self-absorbed days
A flash of grace from a tubercular year

Your Package Has Been Delivered

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The Rockies were even more majestic than I had imagined. The Kansas Prairie, as stark as I’d expected but I hadn’t made room in my brain for the smell of cow patties for miles. The storms of Utah scared me so profoundly I knew I’d never make this trip back by car, ever again.

Of course, the first stop was Vegas, where I’d been a thousand times, and the 118 degree temps that did something weird to my car engine didn’t surprise me in the least. Thankfully, it was temporary, as I continued east and gradually north, making this move I never remotely had in my plans for my life.

I’d managed to amass 60 years on this planet without ever living anywhere other than Los Angeles, and now I was moving to Kansas City, Missouri, the heartland, the prairie, the home of tornadoes and Charlie Parker, a red state but a blue town, artful and socially progressive, even though it was here that I was called the N word for the first time ever … at least that I’ve known about. Seriously, I may just be the most sheltered Black person on the planet.

I am trying to find my identity in this new place that doesn’t require me to let go of what LA built in me, while wanting to flow with this KC charm and warmth. Trying to be both, trying to have both. In LA, I was regarded in my town’s music scene. Here, I’m barely a smudge on a wall, largely unnoticed, but not in a rude way, just the experience of a new birth and my own penchant for cocooning. I don’t even go out for auditions for the many plays that are being cast at the very theater where I work. My instinct, as I’ve said, is just to stay a little bit cocooned, and I’m not even certain why. The fight-or-flight pace of LA kind of did me in a little, so I guess I just want to breathe slower, talk slower, decide things slower, get involved slower, emerge slower. I guess. Just looking for simple.

Two years here now, and no I have not done the drive back west again (though I’ve flown home a few times now). I meant it when I said I had sworn off those torrential rains. I feel very settled here, and happy. Still not completely out of my performance shell yet, but that’s okay. I’ve done some singing. I chased fame and travel and record deals and pizzazz for so long in LA, and it beat me to a pulp, frankly. Just looking for simple. And yet even with the agenda to simplify, I still manage to over-commit myself. Total co-dependency thing. I definitely need more than just my once-a-week Al-Anon meeting. Winters blow here. I know, weird segue. I will never embrace the snow. It just isn’t in the bones of this Cali Girl. I know, I know, be open-minded.

I love the friends I’ve made in my new town. Few, which means fewer choices of who to call for a hang, or whose invitation to accept for a hang. I miss my LA friends like nobody’s business (thank God for Zoom!). That circle was and is VAST, and I am so much luckier and more blessed than I ever truly appreciated when I was actually there. But here, I sort of like it that my circle is small. Fewer decisions to make. Have I said yet that I’m looking for simple?

Here, I can embrace being 62. There, it’s the thing you’re supposed to hide. Artistic pursuits are blowing up for me here. In LA, I did the gig beat for nearly 40 years, and it was every experience from dazzling to grueling. No regrets at all. It was an extraordinary time in my life, but there wasn’t really any other avenue of my pursuits that ever went anywhere for me. Here, I’ve had firsts. Of course, everything I did in LA began as firsts, it being where I began life. But the firsts that have happened since I’ve been here are kind of dizzying. Amazing, humble, grand, small, precious firsts. My first-ever poetry reading where I was invited to be the featured poet (and I’ve had a few now) in a town known for its vibrant and weighty poetry community. First time having a hand in getting a jazz series started (at the theater where I work). First time I’ve gotten to be a participant in a wall mural (up at the iconic Unity Village). First time making a little documentary short about a Kansas City community event (the citywide Black Lives Matter street murals), and having it be my first ever Official Selection in a film festival. My first time ever having art of mine juried into a gallery exhibit, which is opening in a few days. My alcohol inks ‘bout to make their li’l splash! Pun intended! (If you know the medium, you’ll know it’s a lot of splashes of ink…never mind…)

I know that my children’s videobook winning multiple film festival awards (whaaaat???) has nothing to do with Kansas City, nor an alcohol ink of mine making the cover of a literary journal, nor having an entire concert of music (by the LA Metropolitan Master Chorale) created and performed around several of my short stories (all firsts), but I’m giving KC the credit anyway, because all these things happened while living here, and somehow here, more than in LA, I’ve managed to cultivate better focus in order to carve the space for these blessings to be made possible. Too much the blitzkrieg of Los Angeles, I guess, and all that that allegorically means, and which kept me just running, bouncing, collapsing, recovering, then running and bouncing again. Ad nauseam.

I’m exhausted. Still, two years later. Walking along the Missouri River humming “Shenandoah,” and the hiking trail that gives me genuine serenity, and strolling the halls of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art weekly — are all great balms that are slowly recovering me.

Did I mention I moved here 2 months into global lock down? Talk about throwing my own roadblocks in my way. I trip and fall a lot. Like…physically. I’m a klutz. But I’m starting to think that has whole other metaphorical layers of meaning for me and my life. And yet I persevere like a cockroach.

I like Kansas City. I might actually love it. No, yes, I definitely love it. I love Kansas City. I am mesmerized by how much art and theatre and music is embraced here. And then there are the city fountains (more than in Rome!), and the recent citywide installation of giant heart sculptures, 154 of them, all painted by different local artists, and which demanded my obsessed attention for 3 months, finding and photographing as many as I could. And the West Bottoms, and the River Market. And the 18th & Vine Jazz District, and the First Fridays Art Walks. And the stupefying amount of live theatre I’ve loved seeing, and not just at the one where I work. And my favorite building on the entire planet, the downtown KC Public Library, whose design is that of a GIANT bookshelf of classics. Crazy cool!

And even if none of that was going on, this move also means I now will not die having never left home. That’s huge for me. A dream I’ve had forever, though in my imaginings it was more along the lines of somewhere in Europe. But that’s okay, since KC is actually known as the “Paris of the Plains.” 🙂 No kidding.

I wouldn’t have chosen it on my own, but Kansas City came my way, and I happily said yes. Leapt. In a way I am not prone to do. I’m still saying yes. No looking back. Well, maybe some looking back. After all, I would take California earthquakes any day over the “Severe Thunder Storm” alerts that routinely pop up on my phone, and do indeed freaking deliver!

Poetry Is

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Often thought of as the genteel art form.

But I’ve known poets who were fierce.

And feral. Whose words cut.

Like a blade. Whose words smelled.

Of gasoline. Pumped

Freon. Into veins.

Poetry at its most punch-packed

is all our stories. The ones we bury.

The ones that try to bury us.  

A feisty turn of phrase. A graceful cadence.

A rhythmic pulse that sings. That brings

music to the proceedings. This army of love.

Carving the space that can hold all the trauma.

We can no longer hold.

The more creviced and stuck in greasy corners.

The more light is shed. And thus.

This magnificent beast that is

poetry operates

as the doorway into gratitude.

The genteel is power also. Hath caused many a heart

to crack open with its beauty.  It’s simply not

The IT and the ALL

of what poetry is.  Not by a

—shall I compare thee to a summer’s day—

long shot.

Unless

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My mother was magical.

She and I shared a most unique experience once. When I think of all her magic, which I find I do a lot since she died 20 years ago this month, it is an experience that could only have occurred for me because of being attached to Martha. I was nine years old, and she was informed by my pediatrician, Dr. Payne—(yeah…that’s not a joke…my entire childhood I envisioned it spelled Dr. Pain)—she was informed by Dr. Payne that I needed my tonsils removed. This was the era when this surgical procedure was done as routinely as tooth extraction. My mother was already scheduled to have lymph node surgery, herself, because of some unexplained lumps in her armpits, which, thank God, would turn out to be benign.

“She can’t be scheduled next week,” my mother said. “I’m going in the hospital next week.” 

And then came that magical word. A word, which, whenever it came out of my mother’s mouth, meant that the impossible was just about to be made possible.

“Unless….” she would offer with a singsong drag of the last syllable, about to tell whomever of her bright idea. And it would usually be an idea that probably shouldn’t be done, and yet her powers of persuasion were quite remarkable. 

In this case, the next thing I knew Dr. Payne had gone from explaining to my mother why hospital regulations would never allow it, because I was a child, etc. to making the arrangements for her and me to not only be hospitalized at the same time, but to be roomed together!

I’d been in a hospital only once before, at five years old, for a hernia operation.  I’d bunked in a ward with twenty other crying children. I didn’t know anyone, and I cried a lot too. And while drinking my alphabet soup one night there, and pulling the bowl up to my mouth, I dribbled half of it down my front. My hospital gown was changed, but the rest remained undiscovered until the bandages were removed weeks later, and pieces of moldy peas and carrots and random letters were prominently found pasted to my groin. I got a laugh from the nurse, which kind of tickled me, but otherwise I’d hated that frightening experience, because frankly I wasn’t comfortable being around other children. So, by this present idea, I was excited. 

Mom and I had our surgeries roughly around the same time, on the same day. I hazily remembered them bringing her into the recovery room, where I already was, as my surgery had concluded first, and I was already coming out of the anesthesia. I saw her crying hysterically. It’s one of the common symptoms of anesthesia wearing off.  But I didn’t know that at the time, and I panicked but my mouth wouldn’t move; I was still under the spell of my own drugs.  I think I remember her trying to punch one of the orderlies, from being so delirious. 

Still, the whole thing remains such an iconic Martha story, because how many people can say they’ve done that?  We had our own private room, Mom and me.  The only part I didn’t find especially enjoyable was that she got chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes for dinner, while I got boring Jello.

My mother was magical.  

When she visited Paris for her first time during my teenage years (a tradition I would inherit, as Paris ended up becoming my favorite city on the planet, which I’ve now visited several times), my mother brought back for me a print of the Post-Impressionist painter Jean-François Millet from the Musée d’Orsay. My hairs stood on end when she presented me with the print, entitled “Shepherdess and her Flock” . . . as it was ME in the painting. This 120-year-old painting!  The portrait was of a field as atmospheric as Millet could occasion, with the young shepherdess and her flock in the foreground. Downward gaze of fleshy cheek and sullen eyes. In fact, no eyes at all, just eyelids. Mine. This was why Martha had bought the print for me. And, of course, the first time I eventually made it to Paris, myself, I promptly went to see this painting in the flesh (or paint & canvas), and was tickled all over again that “I” lived in this museum in the great City of Lights, an ocean away from the life I knew.

But on this day when Martha brought the print home to me, I remember being so stunned that my face was the face in this painting that I asked how this could be possible! And yet another “unless” escaped like a fairy dust spurt from her mouth, as my whimsical mother could never resist a merry penchant for spinning magical fables—her loveliest trait, frankly. And she began by using, as a component in her case, the fact that our family name on her side is Shepard, then proceeded to declare that I WAS that shepherdess another lifetime ago, and had been Jean-François’ muse and perhaps even his lover. And as my face grew completely scarlet from the embarrassment that my mom would say these things to me, she just laughed with great jollity, and with—as always, gratefully, gratefully always—the undeniable sparkle of possibility. 

Blessings and flight among the angels, my sweet, magical girl.

Happy New Year 2022

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May this New Year bring you peace, surrender, serenity, and a few breathtaking insights.  May you want for nothing, because you already have everything.  May the intentions you set this day be felt against the sides of mountains, ring into the ether with an ear-warming reverberation, and settle in the bones of those not as fortunate as you.  And may those intentions keep us all connected like a mighty woven net of love that always catches us when we fall. Happy New Year, one and all! 

As a working musician, the very last thing I do in the very last moments of every year is sing.

“… as it has been since forever ago and auld lang syne.  I am a New Year baby; it is in my DNA to usher out an old, usher in a new. To ritualize the idea of rebirth, renewal, and restoration; to chant, to pray, to dance, to give auspiciousness to new beginnings and rites of passage, to participate in burning bowl rituals and labyrinth walks, to summon the rains and the gods, to howl at the moon, to burn sage, to close my eyes, shut off the valve and listen. Listen to the wind in the trees tell me what I need to know next, what I need to do next, how I need to sing next. And then I sing.” ——— (Excerpt from my poem “Lost & Found” from the collection BONES)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

And In This Corner

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All these wisdoms that have shouted at me for an eternity.

There’s the parable of the genius writer whose book has sold more than any other in the history of books, has made her rich, legendary. And on her deathbed she’s still trying to work out a better ending to her masterpiece. Alive till we die.

That particular one is filled with an alluring fertility (and ripe for a hashtag), one that exhausts me even as it draws me to it. I mean, do I really have to work that hard in this life?

Then there’s the one, Eastern in origin, about needing less, and the wisdom in non-attachment, which proposes that right where we are, without all those constant yearnings and itches and creepy-crawlers in our veins, IS right where we are supposed to be, and that every situation, every person, every direction of the wind is exactly The What, The Who, The Where, and The When of our life, as it is meant to be.

The silence and calm of that particular one draws me to it like a craving I cannot quench. No room for a person obsessively refining her masterpiece in that wisdom. That one implies an eternal hunger. This one implies an eternal peace.

I would pay good money to see both wisdoms duke it out in the ring, frankly, because my arms have been pulled out of their sockets by each one vying for my club membership, as I try my damnedest to live by both creeds, try to find a snug beanbag on which to plop these bones, and want for absolutely nothing. Least of all, a quiet center. Least of all, a soul on fire.

The First Snow

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The city grows still, save the snowfall.

Did it really grow still?  People staying

inside, burrowing in with their

coffee and the paper?  Or does

the snow absorb the hum of the city

into its cells?  Making certain this

moment is honored with silence?

Birds flit and fly.

Snowflakes alight on my

eyebrows.  And the stillness is a balm

from which I hope to never

emerge.  But I will.

Tomorrow’s forecast — slushy rain,

the swoosh of tires on wet

streets, the bustle resumed.

So I take this moment.

Except I can’t really take it,

as it isn’t mine to take,

but is its own magnificent

sovereignty I am merely

allowed the privilege of tasting,

however fleeting.

Spilled Milk (spoken word)

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From the ALEATORY ON THE RADIO collection.