Her Writing
Influenced by:
James Baldwin, Carolyn Forche, Susan Griffin, Linda Hogan and W.S. Merwin.
A Tour of East Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado, circa 1974
The New York Quarterly in 2022.
I wrote this poem in response to a prompt given by poet Carolyn Forche in a Lighthouse Writers workshop focused on the poetry of witness.
To wander East Colfax Avenue in the 1970s is to be young, female, angry and ripe, a June tomato planted early, reddens on the vine, splits open and bleeds. It runs down your leg and stains the street. You don’t stop, you don’t wipe, you let it remain, to remind us of the disappeared women, to remember Joan Little, the inmate who refused the guard in the prison kitchen with an ice pick.
Ten Ways of Looking at the West
Sage Green Journal (http://sagegreenjournal.org/jacqueline-st.-joan.html)
I
I drive the canyons of the West
Deliberately,
The way I drag my finger between
The shoulder blades of the cat.
A Mother's Advice to her Children
Third Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.
If you ever get the chance, live with an artist.
Live with an artist and you begin to notice
the shapes of things.
Even the air around the enormous
sprig of forsythia
in the beer bottle,
the way its presence
makes the room fade away,
its relationship with the white wall,
its simple canvas.
Restraining Order
First Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.
I am watching the freckles
on the back of my fingers
multiply and divide like
lovers under the lens. The
speaker at my podium
says: He's my pimp. Tore
a branch from a tree. Beat
me. The branch broke.
White Rain
Honorable Mention, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.
Although it is summer evening,
hair spray and Nescafé
smell so strong and familiar
it makes one wonder if it is morning or night.
In the tiny yellow bathroom,
a beautiful thing
Published in Mountain Talking, Fall, 2016 and Sage Green Journal
It is a beautiful thing to wake
in the dark chill of October
and go out into it
where a crescent moon
and two stars appear both ahead
Letter to Muriel Rukeyser at the End of the Twentieth Century
Denver Press Club Poetry Award
Your poems shock
the way waterlilies burning in a museum
shock the moneyed. With fragrant treason you begged even the rich,
to understand, As you spoke to each generation as that generation,
your dark hair curled in the thirties
by a passion electric for justice.
What Zero Looks Like
First Place, Lyrical Poetry, Columbine Poets of Colorado, 2015
He says, What’s the biggest number?
What’s out there, after atmosphere and space?
We are driving home from preschool.
There is no biggest number, I say.
There is always one more.
Re-stitching The Sky
Turkey Buzzard Press
Vees of geese are sewing Denver back into its morning,
where telescopic, multifaceted periscopes
take in the entire dance & climb.
To the west, snow- peaked triangles; downtown,
rectangles of finance & domes of government;
under the interstate, warehouses of industry &
puffs of cottonwood along the river.
The Left Margin
Second Place, Free Verse, Columbine Poets of Colorado, 2016
I love the margins,
the left margin
that anticipates comment,
leaves room for
corrections, doodles,
The Drama of the Long Distance Runners
Published in Thinking Women: Introduction to Women’s Studies, Kendall-Hunt, 1995.
I watch you in the court
House coffee shop. Sitting next to
The angry young woman. The one with
A newborn tied to her chest. Fear
And despair criss-cross her back. You…
Glenn Miller Was Missing
Published in War, Literature and the Arts, 1997 and in Thomas J. Cooley Journal of Clinical and Practical Law, 2001. It won a Clincal Legal Education Association poetry award.
Glenn Miller was missing. Somewhere over the English Channel,
his plane went down in December 1944. You'd been drafted,
even with a wife and two daughters to support and
day work in a defense plant and night work in the clubs,
your teeth clamped onto the reed of a saxophone, chin tucked in…
Red on Her Fingers
Published in Tumblewords: Writers Reading the West, University of Nevada Press, 1995
Every morning it was waiting on the other side of her
eyelids; lingering near the coffee pot until fed;
it didn't eat much, though it ate often; at first
it was only a sound in her body, racehorses crossing
her chest; her breath and her heartbeat panting at the gates…
Autumn in Five Parts
Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016) published in Colorado Women News July 1993 and Montelibre, 1993.
In early autumn, sunny gusts signal a shift,
the kind of mystery neighborhood crows warn about.
In the garden, the last zucchini lies down with the cucumber,
under an enormous frond.
Quincentenary Poem: Civic Center Park, 1992
Selected Poems from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016) published in Colorado Women News July 1993 and Montelibre, 1993.
One by one they circle the park,
Eagles facing east from
Courthouse columns
Capitol dome
Museum fortress
The glass rectangular offices of industry.
Poetry Is An Act of Love
Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016).
To love a country is to know its poets.
Is there the soul of a human being in there?
Pure uncertainty yearns in a minor key.