The Zingara Project

A Space for Practicing Poets and Process

Designed with WordPress

  • Got Books? The 2026 Great Pittsburgh Book Crawl Begins Today!

    by

    ,

    One of the MANY things I love about my new home city, Pittsburgh, PA, is its plethora of indie book stores. Near my home and within reasonable driving distance are Stay Gold Books in Regent Square, Fungus Books and Records, also in Edgewood, White Whale and Caliban Books in the Shady Side area, and Riverstone Books and Amazing Books and Records near Squirrel Hill.

    This is by no means a complete or even extensive list.

    The other thing I love about my new home is the Pittsburgh Annual Book Crawl–starting today, Saturday, July 18, 2026, now in its second year.

    The GPBC provides an opportunity for book lovers and avid readers to visit participating stores between July 18-26, nine full days, to explore their offerings, find hidden objects, and do a little shopping if so moved.

    And, of course, support local indie bookstores.

    At each stop you can get a passport book stamped, available for free at participating locations on a first come first served basis starting Saturday, showing that you visited that location. Get enough stamps (15 this year) and you’ll be entered to win a raffle prize put together by all the stores.

    Passport books contain information on each participating location, so they’re a great resource if you want to plan a big trip to a lot of indie bookstores in the area (highly recommended). A stamped passport book is the only way to be entered to win a prize from the Book Crawl.

    As mentioned above, you will need 15 stamps to be entered into the raffle prize drawing. If you plan to participate every day of the crawl, that’s 1.5 stores per day. If you’re a weekend-only kind of person, that’s 3-4 stops a day.

    You do not need to make a purchase at each store. However, you will need to find the Hidden Object in stores where a purchase isn’t being made to receive your Passport Stamp. Each store has been tasked with hiding an image of a meaningful book somewhere in their store. This image could be as elaborate or as simple as a store would like. Your job is to find the book hidden in the store and then relay the title of that book to an employee in lieu of a purchase at that store.

    I’ve already purchased my swag, a 2026 Great Pittsburgh Book Crawl magnet for my fridge collection, just for the fun of it and to support the crawl. I selected my favorite nearby indie bookstore, Stay Gold Books, as the recipient of the donated proceeds of that sale. They also have stickers if you prefer.

    The best way to see what special events some stores may offer during the Book Crawl is to follow the GPBC Instagram page (@pghbookcrawl) or follow bookstores you want to make sure to visit.

    Once you have 15 (or more stamps) in your book crawl passport, just complete the raffle page and leave it with any participating store location. After the Crawl is complete entries will be gathered for the raffle.

    Along the route will be “coffee, dogs (I assume the food), and bookstore discoveries across Southwestern PA.

    This morning, on my way to my improv embroidery class at Contemporary Craft, I’ll stop in and get my 2026 GPBC passport

    Here is a list of all participating stores and a map of the area.

    I’m excited by this challenge for the sake of exploring bookstore in my area but also to explore the city and region I now call home.

    Maybe I’ll see you fellow pilgrims along the route!

    Happy crawling!

  • Happy Caturday from a Fierce Little Kitty

    by

    May you catch every wonderful thing that rolls your way today.

  • A Writer’s Day of Smoke and Haze

    by

    , ,

    It appears to be an overcast morning in Pittsburgh today, but it’s not clouds that obscures the sun but a thick haze of smoke from many intense Canadian forest fires burning uncontrolled. Peering outside my studio window now I can see that the air is as thick as if there were a back draft from my fireplace chimney.

    So, like many other cities and states in the region, there is an air quality alert. Pittsburgh, for the first time in history, has an air quality alert of “purple,” meaning it is dangerous to be outside for everyone, not just those with heart conditions or asthma. The warnings are dire enough to have initiated pool closures and event cancelations.

    Most summer mornings I like to take my breakfast out on the screened porch and write in my journal as I watch the birds at the feeder–and also the cats, who watch the birds at the feeder–from our side of the screens.

    Today, I will stay inside.

    The cats are confused by this change in routine and spent an hour this morning mewing at the back door to tell me it was time to open up and let them out.

    They have since found me and my bowl of cottage cheese, of which they hope to partake, upstairs in my office studio, fans and air purifier running on medium high, settling in for a day of writing.

    Once I’ve sorted through my thoughts and gotten “right” with myself in a journal entry, the choice becomes whether to write something new, revise a work in progress, or put the finishing edits on a draft I hope to send out into the world.

    Choosing to pen something new is always a little exciting but also rife with anxiety. First, there is the little bit of grief that comes from NOT writing whatever I chose not to write. That is, if I decide to write an essay, I won’t get to write a poem or a story (or a blog).

    This is true of writing related activities, too.

    If I choose to work on an application for a residency, for example, or do a little research, I am forgoing time spent in the throes of creative writing.

    There often also comes an overwhelm of ideas when writing something new, which may lead to searching for stray notes left on the backs of envelopes or of figuring out in which of many notebooks a certain idea was jotted down.

    I suppose this could be mitigated with the use of my iphone or a note-taking app, but besides just never having picked up such habits (my ingrained habit is to reach for a pencil and some paper), I am hopelessly paranoid about the possibility of others accessing these missives, especially in the age of cloud computing and AI.

    Or maybe all that searching is a tactic to further delay the difficult job of getting down to the business of actual writing. Anything is possible.

    If, on the other hand, revising a work in progress emerges as the writing activity of the hour there is at least some relief over not having to come up with something brand new to write about, or of having to conquer the blank page or screen under the pressure of an internal perfectionist who likes to stick her nose where it simply does not belong.

    At least not until I begin to look over my drafts and discover they aren’t as interesting as I thought they were when in the throes of creatively writing them.

    It’s almost as if these writings morph from shiny cut diamonds back into lumps of coal when I’m not looking.

    The internal perfectionist loves to take advantage of such moments to tell me I suck at writing, that everything I write sounds just like everything else, and really it would be better to spend my time cleaning the house or paying bills.

    I suspect my internal perfectionist is actually lazy and doesn’t want the challenge of re-cutting a diamond in the rough.

    Supposing I am able to send my perfectionist packing, which never gets easier no matter how many times I’ve done it in the past, I generally spend a several minutes just opening documents until I find something I can dig into or, if really lucky, something that is closer to being finished that I realized (rare). Only occasionally do I go directly to a specific document to work on as a result of having remembered or thought about it during the day or because I have a deadline to meet.

    What’s eternally necessary and important, though, is that writing remains a joy even amid the difficulties. I mean, a bad day writing (even when there is an air quality alert) is still better than a good day at work, right?

    Come to think of it, a day of not writing is even better than a good day at work.

  • Creative Cross-Training

    by

    Lately my narrative and artistic impulses have been leaning more toward visual and tactile expression than the intellectual and writerly.

    Not that I’ve stopped writing or anything, only that writing must share time with my expanding slow-stitching practices, especially as I delve deeper into improvisational and intuitive forms.

    I learned to embroider the summer I turned 12. My step mother had bought an embroidery kit for me, one complete with a black satin pillow cover stamped with a pattern of two kittens, and a few skeins of DMC floss. It was the first time I ever did well at something right away and she marveled at how quickly I picked up the back stitch, running stitch, stem stitch, and the lazy daisy. The only stitch I couldn’t master that summer was the French Knot.

    Embroidery was the perfect past-time for those summers I spent with Dad and his second wife, musicians who traveled the country performing at various hotel lounges, VFW Halls, and the occasional wedding gigs. While daytime hours were spent at the hotel pool, catching an occasional movie in the town’s local theater, and dining on the finest fast food available, evenings were spent alone in the hotel room listening to music and practicing embroidery stitches.

    I nearly finished embroidering that satin pillow, with the exception of the French Knots, before returning home to Mom that summer, and still have it. In fact, it is one of extremely few items from childhood that survived multiple relocations, a house fire, two floods, my father’s second divorce, divorce from my first husband, marriage to a second, and even a hurricane. Events that tend to naturally slough off all but the most essential of material goods.

    I’ve kept at the practice off and on all these years, even learning cross stitch when that became so popular in the 90s, right up into adulthood and first marriage.

    At some point, influenced probably by certain prevailing attitudes over what constitutes art, I convinced myself that embroidery wasn’t really an art form and stopped practicing despite my deep love for it and spent my time instead on, well, raising children, returning to school, studying and writing tons, and generally figuring out some kind of career for myself.

    Fortunately, I never quite had the nerve to get rid of all my embroidery supplies, thanks in no small part to a friend who advised me against doing so when I asked if she knew anyone who would want them. Since then, just seeing those many skeins of colorful floss, various embroidery hoops and frames I’d collected over the years, and all the interesting fabrics I stashed away for future projects every time I moved or reorganized my closets reminded me that I could return to embroider any time I liked.

    When the Pandemic kept us all home for weeks and months at a time, it was a prime opportunity to rededicate myself to both writing and embroidery. I finished a few projects during that time only to order more patterns and supplies than I probably can not use up in my lifetime.

    I am ready now to move beyond patterns and try abstract, improvisational, and intuitive embroidery and look forward to a workshop at Contemporary Craft Saturday.

  • Drinking Juliper in July by Samantha Tetangco

    by

    ,

    Response to “Humor in Public Spaces” prompt

    Drinking Juniper in July

    I love the sound of her laughter coming down the stairs of this bar in the Netherlands which is playing Whitney Houston while the table next to me is full of twenty-something-year-old Dutch Girls talking, in Dutch, about Harry Potter.  I know this because between the string of words, I hear something something maar Dumbledore, something something maar Hermione Granger, their tongues making soft guttural sounds with Hermione’s g’s, and one of the girls leans back in her chair.  She stretches her arms behind her head, switches to English when she says, Bitch I should have cheated on him, and right on cue, breaks into song, singing It’s not right, but it’s okay, and the man behind the bar said yeah, Juliper is a good beer if you like beer.  It’s the Dutch version of Bud Light only Dutch, so it’s better, and families are wheeling by on their bicycles, and Whitney’s song ends and Kate Bush begins, and upstairs Randi must be losing her mind she must be so happy to be surrounded by the song of a Dutch conversation group and Kate, of course, and I take a long deep breath.  

    The soft scent of cigarettes hang in the air.  The insect crawling over my page looks like the flag of a subdued country.  The girls are singing about running up that hill but they don’t quite know the words so they mumble their way through and they definitely don’t care and it’s there in the break of their song, between the known and unknown that I feel my body return to my body.  I set down my pen.  I sit inside the soft light of summer.  I understand something then, about days designed just for this. 

    I love this prompt, though admittedly, it wasn’t an easy one for me to find a way through.  I’d written another poem, one in which it had a similar pattern – an unexpected song in an unexpected place and the unexpected way my own body in space responded – but found it hard to balance the observed moment with the moment of a poem.  Eventually, I had to set that one aside, but I do think that initial exercise taught me something because several months later, while in a bar in the Netherlands, I was given a second chance.

    The first draft of this poem wasn’t too far off from the final one.  I’d scratched it into a notebook almost in real time, but it was only later, after I’d returned back home to the US, after I could feel the weight of today’s political world making it hard to be still again, that I found myself returning to this poem for reasons that had less to do with poetry and more to do with my mind’s desire for the relief of that summer.  So as I revised it, that’s what I sat with – how to take the spinning mind towards stillness, even if just for the moment.

    Samantha Tetangco is author of Hope You Blend In: Studies in Color & Light  (Broadstone Books, 2024). She is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of California Merced where she teaches creative writing, audio storytelling, and first-year composition. 

  • Pittsburgh Independence Day Anniversary

    by

    ,

    On July 4, 2024, my husband and I took off from Charleston, SC, in my Toyota Camry, backseat full of plants and our two cats. We drove nearly nonstop to Pittsburgh, PA, our new home, taking advantage of the light traffic while keeping an eye out for eager highway patrolmen looking to cash in on a double-fine holiday.

    I’ve relocated an inordinate amount of times in my life, though there are plenty who have done so more. Still, I think I am fairly good at handling the logistics surrounding a big move, even when across town or to a new state (or country, as was the case in 2009).

    But once the concrete logistics are handled and the dishes are arranged neatly into cupboards, it’s the non-tangible aspects of moving that demand attention.

    Sometimes these non-tangibles are discovering that the hair stylists in your new city just can’t compete with your old hair stylist, and you’re not so sure the money you save equates to a satisfying cost/benefit ratio.

    Other times it’s realizing you haven’t anyone to spend a holiday with.

    The most challenging intangibles at stake after a big move, I believe, is one’s sense of normalcy–something already up to interpretation on any given day.

    By normalcy I mean the sense that once the dust settles, one’s work routine, hobbies, or habits of writing and editing will naturally pick up where they were left off, totally forgetting that these processes are a matter of stop and start and quite reliant on a little thing called reality.

    And by reality I mean unexpected changes to one’s teaching schedule or the bus you rely on to get to work just not showing up one morning.

    Also, there were those fifteen inches of snow that fell in one day.

    The frenetic pace of keeping up and juggling a plethora of new realities inevitably has caused a lot of important stuff to fall to the wayside.

    Which is why I am still sorting through poem submissions.

    I mean, I reached out to someone who submitted work on June 11 of last year to see if their poems were still available.

    Where did that year do?

    Oh yeah. I covered that.

    All of this is to say that if you are waiting to hear about work you have sent for consideration I am actually combing through submissions now and hope to respond to you soon.

    In the meantime, I appreciate your patience.

    And your impatience, too.

  • Blowing on the Pinwheel by Luanne Castle

    by


    Blowing on the Pinwheel

    Night terrors woke my baby son.
    We let him lie between us, but he refused to sleep.
    So I put him back, and resumed crying.

    Pinwheel would be a great word
    if it wasn’t so close to pinworm.
    If pinwheels stop, everything slides to a halt.

    The crying carried out over our garden.
    We called it our convent garden, beautiful,
    spiritual, chaste, pure, and isolated.

    That night I dreamed of a huge black rat,
    bigger than a jackrabbit, with pinwheels
    for eyes, staring at me, telling me something.

    What I heard wasn’t crying, but screaming,
    from a nest of baby birds in the garden.
    We are hungry, hungry, hungry, they wailed.

    Another time, I dreamed of a party, women
    in a group around me, one of them tried
    to pull a mouse from my mouth by the tail.

    My son woke crying, so I fed  and rocked him,
    When I set him down, he cried. Waiting for a baby 
    to stop crying is like waiting for something to die.

    Luanne Castle has published four award-winning poetry collections and has been awarded nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. It has been published in Copper Nickel, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, American Journal of Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, Thimble, The Mackinaw, One Art, Lothlorien, and many other journals and anthologies. 

  • Almost Ancestral by Sharon Scholl

    by

    Poetic response to the “Intangible Inheritance” prompt:

    Almost Ancestral

    My great grandsons know me
    as the silent watcher,
    too fragile for their childhood tussles,
    whose love is mostly smiles
    and toys tainted with instruction.

    They’ll recall me as a shadow
    that passed briefly through their lives
    so long ago as to be mythical.
    Perhaps an object will appear, explained
    as from your great grandma.

    The density of time escapes them,
    attached as they are to the instant.
    Their lives brim with days newly cut
    from the fabric of the present. For them,
    I recede into the ancestral past.

    The “Intangible Inheritance” prompt immediately struck me as something that I, in my 93rd year, wonder about.  I’m fairly sure how my children and grandchildren will remember me.  I leave behind long years of personal association with them.   But great-grandchildren are simply separated by time and frailty into a gulf that cannot be crossed.  So what dim impression of me might linger with them?

    Sharon Scholl is a retired college teacher who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website (freeprintmusic.com) which donates music to small, liberal churches.  Her poetry collections, Remains, Seasons, Classifieds, Ghosts, are available via Amazon Books.  Her poems are current in Rattle and Red Rose, Thorns.

  • Found Poems from Christina Baumis

    by

    ,

    This submission is in response to the “What You Leave Behind” prompt posted April 13 2025.

    Artist’s Statement: I love a good blackout poem because of the quick surprise of what called to me and arises from what was left behind. The poem almost evolves as a “do not touch the hot stove…there is a lesson here”. My approach seems to be scan rapidly and circle phrases or words that propel the thoughts I am reaping. Then I enjoy using colored pencil to “blackout” the text which wasn’t selected. Often I use a free domain classic book and open to a page and let myself go for the quick surprise. 

     Turned

    I became aware
    I remember
    for the first time.
     
    struggling with 
    yesterday
    and turned
    a shoulder
     
    in front of him
    unhappily
     A Slight Movement Inside
     
    Recreating
    a rumor
    no one
    ever blew breath into
     
    was just hugging
    wonder
    wonder, repeatedly
    a slight movement inside.

    Christina Baumis serves on the board of The Poetry Society of South Carolina (PSSC). Ms. Baumis’ works are in Poems on the Comet, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and South 85 Journal among other engaging publications. She was the second place recipient of The North Carolina Poetry Society’s Jean Williams Poetry of Disability, Disease, and Healing Award 2024. With PSSC, Ms. Baumis hosts Poetry Trails- gatherings to share poems on SC trails and parks. She co-initiated and volunteered for Cypress Gardens SC’s annual Poetry Walk event with participants’ poetry displayed around the swamp. Ms. Baumis recently was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Goose Creek, SC.

  • Emily Dickinson Duet of Original Poems by Charles Weld

    by

    ,

    Poetic response to the “Collect, Remix, Repeat” and “Not the Kind You Flip” prompts:

    Duet with Emily about White-throated Sparrows

    They stop in our yard for a week or two
    late April, early May—passing through
    fast on their way north to nest. A few
    blue notes this year, the only clue,
    the minor third repeated, no bird in view—
    a single term of cautious melody—
    sounding tired after weeks of migratory
    travel from Georgia, Florida—some southern vicinity.
    Yankee listeners like Emily and family
    heard the bird say, “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody,”
    a moniker to tame strangeness with familiarity,
    and ease it into a place among the certainties.
    Unordered flux, bordering the realm of taboo,
    called out for intervention. Measure, name, subdue.

    Duet with Emily at Dawn

    Birds, a Summer morning Before the Quick of Day
    start in our yard with robins who arpeggio away
    in the darkness before a cardinal joins the melee.
    An alarm sounds from a jay
    or crow—scolds, both wanting their say.
    Then every bird is bold to go on record and forté
    amps up to fortissimo in a wild array
    of tunings. By 7—I’m surprised—the heyday
    is over. Dawn’s promise begins to decay.
    The sun is up, and things weigh
    in, each with its own gravity. Some days I say yea,
    some nay to unremitting Hope—active always
    Yet never wearing out—words from the sensei
    who studied life deeply, but stayed outside its fray.

    Both poems contain lines from Emily Dickinson and are about birds. So, a little nod to the “Collect, Remix, Repeat” prompt of April 11, but more in line with the “Not the Kind You Flip” prompt of April 26. I’ve been writing single-rhyme poems with Emily lines for about a year, but the bird subject returned when our spring migrants returned in April and May.

    Charles Weld’s poems have been collected in two chapbooks, Country I Would Settle In (Pudding House, 2004) and Who Cooks For You? (Kattywompus, 2012.) A full-length collection, Seringo, was published by Kelsay Books in 2023. A partially-retired administrator for a non-profit agency serving the mental health needs of children and youth, he lives in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

  • Into the Land of Mother Goose by Luanne Castle

    by


    Pouring the carton of milk down the sink
    I reflected how I need to change my habits
    to save a cow or two from anguish and despair.
    Which led me to land upon the border
    between fantasy and history and the work
    of my ancestors—in Goes, pronounced Hoose—
    my 5th great-grandmother, Adriana Goose
    the mother of 3 living children, hence,
    Mother Goose, worked as a milkmaid,
    the spitting image of Vermeer’s painting,
    even more the crone in spectacles and cap
    riding the goose as if she delivered imagination
    when in reality, Adriana delivered milk and cheese
    to her customers and kept the cows content.
    My 3rd great-grandfather, Adriaan Zuijdweg,
    was a tailor who sat on his table, hunched
    over the cloth, sewing pants for the townspeople.
    My 2nd great-grandfather, Pieter Mulder, learned
    the shoemaking trade before he immigrated
    to Grand Rapids where he learned cabinet-
    making, until he was promoted to the level
    just below the members of the owning family.
    Gone was the need for shoemaking and for elves,
    but the burgeoning middle class demanded
    well-crafted bureaus and chairs and armoires.
    Going was the need for tailoring except
    for wedding alterations and hemming.
    Gone was the need for milkmaids when
    the cows went into the factories that recreated
    them as objects to be sacrificed to change. 

    "Into the Land of Mother Goose" was inspired by the "whispers of work" prompt and by the work my ancestors did in their country of origin, The Netherlands, as well as after immigration to the United States. I am especially intrigued by having a milkmaid ancestor named Goose.

    Luanne Castle has published four award-winning poetry collections and has been awarded nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. It has been published in Copper Nickel, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, American Journal of Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, Thimble, The Mackinaw, One Art, Lothlorien, and many other journals and anthologies. 

  • Call for Submissions

    by

    , ,

    Submissions for poems written in response to prompts posted here are open until July 1, 2026.

    Submit poems to zingarapoet(at)gmail.com (replace “at” with @)

    REMEMBER to include the NAME OF THE PROMPT in the subject line of your email.

    Paste your poem submission(s) into THE BODY OF YOUR EMAIL.

    Include a few sentences about your writing process (how you got from prompt to final draft) in your email.

    It’s not necessary to explain what your poem is about, rather why you made the choices that you made.

    For instance:

    • What about the prompt compelled you to write?
    • Why did you chose the form you chose?
    • How did you come to include musicality into your poem?
    • How did you discover the imagery or metaphors used in your poem?
    • How many revisions did you make?

    There are a number of great example of poets writing about process like this one on Marsh Hawk Press in which Ellen Bass explicates some of her work.

    Yours does not have to be anywhere as involved or detailed as this example, but Bass’ essay does exemplify a beautiful approach.

    Poems may be overtly related to the prompt of choice or have only a thread of connection.

    If you wrote a poem in response to a prompt and threw out all but one line during revision, that counts.

    Surprising is preferred to the predictable.

    Be sure to also mention if you happened to also use any of the revision prompts posted during May or June in the process.

    Please include a brief professional biography of 50 words or fewer, also in the body of your email.

    Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let ZPR know immediately if submitted work is accepted elsewhere.

    All poetry prompts from the 2025 challenge can be found under that tab 2025 POETRY PROMPTS or by clicking here: 2025 Poem-a-Day Challenge

    Feel free to email or comment with questions. I look forward to reading your work!

  • A Visit to the Palm Springs Palace by Judy Fitzpatrick

    by

    Everyone has lost weight here
    at the palace in Palm Springs.
    Where orchids, roses, lilies flourish
    but people do not.

    A helper hefts her client from bed
    to wheelchair, to table.
    First a thorough clean up.
    Then they eat, but not much.

    The helper’s husband is in Sri Lanka.
    He hopes to join his wife
    who is also hopeful.
    “God never gives you anything
    you can’t handle,” she says.
    I see my sister-in-law drop
    a green grape into her lap, crippled hands
    that can’t close completely
    and think God’s plan isn’t working.

    A loving son pays the rent.
    He is cheerful.
    Sleeps late.
    Happy to weigh 30# less.

    Mornings I sip coffee.
    Pick at glazed buns bought for me.
    Ask the helper to put me on her prayer list.
    My sister-in-law chews and swallows THC and CBD.
    It helps her tolerate the pain.

    This morning my sister-in-law stabs
    a piece of egg, the yolk burnt orange.
    “Got it!” She exclaims.
    I lean in to her, fill the space inside her shirt collar.
    No longer a sister-in-law.
    Instead a sister after more than sixty years.

    A mallard nests at the palace.
    Eggs laid poolside among the petunias.
    Upon my return home I receive a photo of
    nine ducklings paddling alongside their mother.
    The next day I’m told they’re gone.
    “She was squawking at 7 a.m.” the helper says.

    Blame it on the hawks who soar overhead.
    It’s as good an explanation as any.
    We have photos to prove what we saw,
    how we suddenly felt hopeful.
    Then we didn’t.

    I spent part of April in Palm Springs with my sister-in-law at a house her son had rented. It was “a palace” but my sister-in-law has had a stroke and it was painful to see her unable to totally enjoy this gorgeous place. My nephew left a copy of Rosemary Wahtola Trommer’s book ALL THE HONEY by my bed and I was reading her poems. You were sending poetry prompts. I was journal writing a poem I couldn’t share with anyone.

    Here is what came of the experience: A Visit to the Palm Springs Palace. My process was to make observations and put them into a form I could manage mentally. I was feeling pretty down. It helped to concentrate on getting the poem right.


    Judy Fitzpatrick, aka Blaze Defiant, hosts BEYOND WORDS, a radio show, on KUPR LPFM in Placitas, New Mexico. 


    Her program streams internationally and you can listen to recent shows by going to KUPR. org and clicking on Archives.
    BEYOND WORDS airs every Saturday at 1 o’clock pm Mountain Time. 

  • True Friends

    by

    A long time ago in China there were two friends, one who played the harp skillfully and one who listened skillfully.

    When the one played or sang about a mountain, the other would say: “I can see the mountain before us.”

    When the one played about water, the listener would exclaim: “Here is the running stream!”

    But the listener fell sick and died. The first friend cut the strings of his harp and never played again. Since that time the cutting of harp strings have always been a sign of intimate friendship.

    From Zen Flesh Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki

  • The Up and The Down by Christina M. Rau

    by

    The Whispers of Work prompt jumped out at me because one of my favorite poems is Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and one of my favorite poetry collections, to which I frequently return, is Jennifer Fitzgerald’s The Art of Work, and it so happens that my grandfather was an elevator operator. When I saw elevator operator on the list of extinct professions, I realized this was a poem for me.

    I did some research about elevators in the 1940s–which is a change for me since I consider myself a lazy poet and rarely look things up. I was fascinated. I created stanzas following grammar and geography, and then I went back and added elevator-language to create authenticity. 

    The Up and The Down

    He ran the elevator.
    It was a job. It came with
    a salary and a seat for when
    standing got tough. 

    In the Garment District,
    he gave vertical rides to folks
    interested in fabrics.

    Out in Iowa
    they used one of the smallest elevators
    Tillotson built, mostly for storage of grain.
    Down in Texas
    they used the largest (of course).
    These were orphan plans, one-offs
    to suit bushel capacity and silo nee\ds.

    Back in New York
    after being pushed towards the Tenderloin,
    he found family among the textile crowd.

    His arms gained strength over the years
    all that manual opening and closing
    of doors, the protective inner and ornate
    iron outer. He controlled the speed,
    controlled direction, announced each
    floor upon arrival.

    The strike froze the city
    but only for a moment
    when everyone realized the marvel—
    the shaft, the car, the rails, 
    the cables, the pulleys—
    the convenience had become.

    Up and down all day, only
    sometimes taking a seat, is
    how he spent the days with 
    only one exception—when 
    the men in suits arrived,
    suggested he go get lunch,
    and he did
    because the salary and the seat
    and the chance to walk home
    before sundown were the dream
    becoming reality every working day.

    Christina M. Rau, The Yoga Poet, leads Meditate, Move, & Create workshops for various organizations worldwide. Her collections include How We Make Amends and the Elgin Award-winning Liberating The Astronauts. She moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv and has served as Poet in Residence for Oceanside Library (NY) since 2020.During her downtime, she watches the Game Show Network.  
    http://www.christinamrau.com