Any Other Color Simply Will Not Do

The shoes are decorated with purple glitter.

PURPLE GLITTER PEOPLE!!!!!

How much do I love this card?

Traces of Tennessee

Two Shoes
Two Years

Tennessee

Cruelty in Numbers

Here's an excerpt from a rejection letter I recently received from Rattle magazine:

After receiving 800 entries in 2006, we read 1,051 this year, totaling well over 4,000 poems...

I don't mean to be petty, but is it too much to ask for the math to add up? Yeah, it sucks for my poetry to have been rejected, but do you have to add insult to injury by throwing in a math word problem that I have no hope of solving?

Affirmation

At last, a respite from the paralysis of drought and 100+ degree temperatures. This morning, the temperature was 55 degrees! Mocha and I followed the trail to the lake and behold... movement and flashes of color and an affirmation that Nature destroys and restores in ways beyond my understanding.

Yellow Swallowtail on Thistle

Passion Vine

Butterfly Duet

Season of Dust

theirs is a quiet kinship
with an extended hand
offering sustenance
throughout this season of dust

fingers deftly pour seed
suspend banquets in the air
beneath a black walnut tree,
bent and weeping for want of shade

a cushion of sunflower hulls
softens the fall of withered leaves,
mutes the groan of ground splitting apart

goldfinches appear suddenly
shattering this scene of decay

they arrange their saffron robes
tilt forward as if praying
gather thistle in their beaks,
black as their shining eyes

eyes that follow familiar movements
of the observer
who sits behind glass and thick masonry walls
where drought and hunger do not exist

as the sun dips low, they sing
of the memory of cool sanctuary

and they wait...

for balance to be struck
for the wheel of the season to turn
for Creation to restore itself
from this season of dust

365

Look around less...

Imagine more.