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  • for want of the moon by Nicolette Daskalakis

    Loose lips slit wrists
    on the dashboard of our bathroom floor
    darling these bodies are too heavy to hold,
    this skin we wear
    for disguise
    is only covering the night.

    You can’t remember the stars
    for want of mirroring the moon,
    I’m here to tell you
    you’ll never shine
    like her,
    effortlessly
    in the scattered dark.

    So sew up your wrists
    before the stars spill out
    from your pretty little veins
    that glow
    in the dark.
    —

    Nicolette Daskalakis is an award-winning filmmaker, poet, and multi-media artist residing in Los Angeles. She received a BA in film production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts and a minor in Intermedia Arts from the Roski School of Art & Design. Her first book, “because you’re now banging a French girl,” was published in 2015.

  • Online Poetry Class Begins Today

    Register today for The Poet’s Toolkit at ZingaraPoet@gmail.com, a Five week online class

    Attend as many or as few classes as you like: $20 per class or $75 for all five weeks

    This five-week course will focus on several of the most integral craft elements of poetry writing and is suitable for writers in any genre. Whether new to the craft or a long-time practitioner, this online class will help you bring focus and new energy to your poetry.

    Each lesson will center on a particular skill and will include sample readings and discussion of the week’s craft element. A selection of representative poems meant to spark lively discussion will be included as will a number of fun and engaging writing prompts.

    • Week One: Vivid details and Sensory images
    • Week Two: Creating surprising similes, metaphors, and other figurative images
    • Week Three: Narrative to imagination (moving from chronology to association)
    • Week Four: Reinvigorating syntax and sentences
    • Week Five: Serious fun with serious revision

    Facilitator: Lisa Hase-Jackson, MFA, passionately believes that great writing comes from active imagination and a careful eye, two characteristics easily cultivated through playfulness.

     

  • Squall by Jennifer Lagier

    All day the sky teases –
    bubbling storm clouds,
    then sunlight around dinnertime,
    dark squall finally
    blowing in from the ocean.

    Gusty deluge whips redwoods
    into a drenched frenzy,
    rust-colored needles cast down
    to become one more startling hue
    in a soggy compost pastiche.

    Night brings banshee winds
    that lift and rattle
    windows and shingles,
    command a second quilt.

    By morning, this cabin,
    a water-tight golden ark,
    shelters and warms,
    offers a good book, crackling fire,
    hot cup of coffee.
    —

    Jennifer Lagier has published ten books of poetry and in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies. She taught with California Poets in the Schools and is now a retired college librarian/instructor. Jennifer is a member of the Italian American Writers Association and Rockford Writers Guild. She co-edits the Homestead Review and maintains websites for Ping Pong: A Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library, The Monterey Poetry Review, and misfitmagazine.net. She also helps coordinate the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium’s Second Sunday Reading Series. Visit her website at: jlagier.net

     

  • Time Is Running Out (to register for The Poet’s Toolkit)

    Hello Poets and Writers!

    This is just reminder that registration for The Poet’s Toolkit is still open. The five-week class begins on Monday, October 17 and will cover important craft elements every writer interested in sharpening their skills will appreciate. Cost is only $75.00 for all five weeks or $20.00 per class for those who wish to pick and choose. In either case, you will have access to the course material beyond the five week session.

    For a full description of the class, including a week-by-week schedule, see my post on Zingara Poet: The Poet’s Toolkit

  • Winter Resignation by KB Ballentine

    A shower of snow, ice dust drifting.
    Hands so cold they burn, and hot pink memories
    of bougainvillea, musk rose burst
    into my mind. You, sitting in a grass field, head turned
    away from me, the first clue.

    Wind picks up, and I tug your old sled
    up the track-scabbed hill, lift our son’s small body
    onto the graying wood. Watch him laugh and tip
    into a pool of space before he, too, speeds away.

    —

    KB Ballentine’s work has appeared in numerous journals and publications. A finalist for the 2014 Ron Rash Poetry Award, she was also a 2006 finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award and was awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2007.  Fragments of Light(2009) and Gathering Stones (2008) were published by Celtic Cat Publishing. Her third collection, What Comes of Waiting, won the 2013 Blue Light Press Book Award.

  • My Eco Crimes by Juan Morales

    Forgive me for running the tap too long,
    houseplants murdered, paper
    towels and paper plates,
    brand new light bulbs dropped, the shabby
    pens lost,
    and house lights left on when no one was home.
    Sorry for the now-extinct mice
    I killed for living in my air conditioner.
    The flowers cut before they went to seed
    the fruits and veggies I didn’t get around to eating
    or bottles and cans too lazy to fish
    from the trash. I apologize for leaving the crust of my bread,
    for pitching
    tin foil after one use.

    But I’m not sorry for
    the smokes I smash out after a few drags
    during the countdown toward a polluted future
    I will miss
    days of excessive living
    with soap or washers and dryers or
    radios or wallets or gas stations
    from a time when I thought
    recycling was good enough.

    —

    Juan Morales is the author of the poetry collections The Siren World, Friday and the Year That Followed, and the forthcoming collection, The Handyman’s Guide to End Times. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, the Editor of Pilgrimage Magazine, and an Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where he directs the Creative Writing Program and curates the SoCo Reading Series.

  • The Poet’s Toolkit: Online Writing Workshop to Begin in October

    Accepting registrations now:

    The Poet’s Toolkit
    Five week self-paced online workshop for writers

    While this five-week course will focus on several of the most integral craft elements of poetry writing, it is suitable for writers in any genre. Whether new to creative writing or a long-time practitioner, this online class will help you bring greater focus and new energy to your writing.

    Each lesson will center on a particular skill and will include sample readings and discussion of the week’s craft element. A selection of representative poems meant to spark lively discussion will be included as will a number of fun and engaging writing prompts.

    Students are invited to write a poem each week in response to any of the readings or prompts. While sharing is always optional, students may do so on a private discussion board. Students are also free to simply follow along with the weekly lessons.

    Feedback on poems from me is available on request.

    • Week One: Drawing on vivid details and sensory images for your poems
    • Week Two: Creating surprising similes, metaphors, and other figurative images
    • Week Three: Narrative to imagination (moving from chronology to association)
    • Week Four: Reinvigorating syntax and sentences
    • Week Five: Serious fun with serious revision

    Price: $20.00 for ala cart classes or $75.00 for all five weeks. Scholarships are available to students and recent graduates. Contact Lisa at zingarapoet@gmail.com for more information or to register.

     

  • The Quincy County Fair Beauty Queen Quits by J.T. Whitehead

    So few are beautiful, inside and out . . .  ugliness is much more generous.  Miss Quincy County, 1983 – she was one of the few . . . carrying out the trash was a weakly task, but for us, she undertook it in a beautifully metaphorical way, once she figured out that cheap excuse for a man – who swore he’d kill her, popped tabs,  screamed at the kids – was a no-good cracker ass, just a turd she could flush with a toilet that worked more than he did . . . you should’ve seen the skids.  They were beautiful . . . she was beautiful . . . No clutch, nor crutch, church, God . . . just . . .  beautiful . . .

    —

    J.T. Whitehead has had over 160 poems accepted for print by over 75 publications.  He is a  Pushcart Prize-nominated short story author, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and a winner of the Margaret Randall Poetry Prize. He is the Editor in Chief of So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.  His first full length collection of poetry, The Table of the Elements, (The Broadkill River Press, 2015), was nominated for the National Book Award.

  •  Bass Lake Trail by Marc Thompson

    I keep thinking of the trees
    in this northern boreal forest
    this ocean of green
    splattered with lakes;
    an ocean
    transubstantiating
    to yellow, orange, red

    Of the jack pines and tamaracks
    that spread their roots
    across the forest floor
    twisting and dodging
    large swaths of granite
    before diving in
    to the shallow earth

    Of two million years ago
    when a burning white landscape
    scraped everything away;
    erased ferns and mastodons
    striated the bedrock
    and buried the land
    in ice half a mile higher
    than the top of my head

    Of wolves, bears,
    moose, and humans
    whose lives depend on
    lichen
    pale, green lichen
    digesting billion-year-old quartz
    and expectorating soil.

    —

     

  • Four More Weeks of “Creative Writing Extravaganza” at Bliss!

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    As Seen in Natural Awakenings Magazine!

    Creative Writing Extravaganza
    Tuesdays, August 16 – October 4, 2016, 7:00 to 8:30 PM
    Bliss Spiritual Co-op
    1163 Pleasant Oaks Drive, off Chuck Dawley Blvd
    Mount Pleasant, SC

    No registration required! Attend all eight weeks or drop in when you can!

    Join us as we explore how the raw material of our life experiences informs our artistic expression and how we can develop them into poems, stories, flash memoir, and more! Each class will focus on a specific sample or style of writing from which students will generate their own work by responding to prompts, engaging in invention activities, and emulating the sample writing itself. Time will also be set aside during each class for students to read aloud from any new work they wish to share (always optional). All levels are welcome.

    We will explore:

    • Imagination in prose and poetry
    • The music of the sentence
    • Forms of poetry (and why they matter)
    • Elements of narrative
    • The Lyric Essay
    • Flash fiction
    • Fun with metaphor, simile, and personification
    • Flash creative non-fiction
    • The role of the writer’s journal
    • How drawing helps writing
    • Deepening writing through awareness and meditation
    • Deepening awareness and meditation though writing
    • Establishing a regular writing practice
    • Working through fear of failure
    • Working through fear of success
    • The joy of revision
    • Revising life stories for empowerment
    • Deepening self-awareness and healing through writing
    • Deepening craft through self-awareness

    Bring your journal, favorite writing instrument, and inner child!

  • New: “Writing from the Heart” Begins This Week in Summerville

    IMG_0586[1]Writing from the Heart
    2nd and 4th Tuesdays of the Month
    Beginning September 14, 2016
    7:00 – 8:00 PM
    Serenity Center
    820 Central Avenue
    Summerville, SC
    No Registration Required, Drop-ins Welcome
    $12.00 per session

    Writing from the Heart

    Whether retraining thought patterns or drafting a lyric poem, journal-writing helps normalize the stuff of life. It is where we make sense of life events and give voice to complex and nuanced emotions. It is where we have permission to rant, wax nostalgic for the good old days, dream about the future, or write crappy sentences. Most of all, it is a space where we can deepen our connections to the world in which we find ourselves.

    Bring your journal, and your heart, to this bi-weekly workshop to learn techniques that will deepen your relationship with your journal and yourself to discover fresh new ways to approach your writing time. Each session will begin with a brief discussion of a meaningful piece of writing, such as an essay, poem, or excerpt from a memoir, which will be followed by a meditation or invention activity. Participants are then invited to write a response in their journals. There will be at least fifteen minutes dedicated to writing time and participants may share if moved to do so.

    Topics include:

    • How to bring a sense of playfulness to our writing (and life)
    • Deepening our inner resources
    • Creativity through self-understanding
    • Overcoming writing blocks
    • Discovering how we limit ourselves (and stop doing so)
    • Changing neuropathways through writing

    About the facilitator:
    tutor photoA passionate teacher who is dedicated to (and fascinated with) the writing process, Lisa Hase-Jackson has been teaching and coaching writers since 2004 when she was granted a fellowship in the Washburn Writing Fellowship program at Washburn University in Topeka, KS. Since then she has facilitated writing circles, workshops, and seminars in such places as Albuquerque, NM, Anyang, South Korea, Kansas City, MO, Toronto, Canada, Allentown, PA, and Charleston, SC. She holds an MA in English with an emphasis in poetry from Kansas State University and an MFA in poetry from Converse College in Spartanburg, SC. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and magazines as have her articles on writing and the writing life. A few of them have won awards.

    A recent transplant to Charleston, Lisa teaches Poetry and Honors English at the College of Charleston and particularly enjoys spending time at the beach or going on bird walks at Caw Caw Interpretive Center. She continues work on her poetry blog, ZingaraPoet.net, and is actively (and hopefully) submitting her poetry manuscript to suitable markets. She is an avid journal writer and has a shelf of journals to show for it. When not writing, teaching, working, or exploring, Lisa enjoys spending time assembling scrap quilts and doing simple knitting projects.

     

  • That Little Leaf by Rebecca Oet

    Sheep, grazing in the fields,
    each one’s nose following the other’s furry tail.
    We are like these cloud brained sheep, numbly following the shepherd.
    Me, I was the same, sitting at a stained, cracked desk typing away.
    My window was open,
    and a leaf drifted through,
    the type of leaf that seems to be the same as any other,
    but I saw it anyway. I got up,
    my keyboard falling,
    falling and splintering on the drab carpeted floor.
    My eyes are spinning,
    swirling now.
    The leaf goes back out the open window,
    and I chase it, right out the window.
    Now I have my quest, and I follow it diligently,
    skimming over the oceans, and soaring above the earth.
    I am carefree,
    alive.
    Until I see you. Just that one glance of you disrupts all of my work,
    you have deadened me.
    My little leaf soars away, and I do not follow.
    You, with your jacket flying in the wind, I can’t get you out of my mind.
    You are beautiful, and strong, and clever too.
    You are my highest idol, and I need to meet you, I scramble over the underbrush, desperately seeking you,
    but you are forever unattainable.
    But taking a glance in the mirror, I finally see.
    The you I was seeking, is me as I should have been.
    I cast off my wings, and plummet back to earth to join you.

    —

    Rebecca Oet is a student from Solon, Ohio, USA.  She enjoys reading, writing short stories and poetry, and of course, taking pictures. Rebecca is a national silver medalist in the 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and has won multiple awards for her writing and photography. She often fantasizes about growing wings and flying through the air.

  • Discovery by Sheila Cowing                   

       (The Ardèche, France)

    DSCN3641

    What they felt beneath that cliff
    at the turn of an old mule path
    from which stretched grape vines,
    on that brushy ledge was a tiny draft
    urging them to clear grass, sticks.

    Wriggling through the hole:
    there by headlamps, translucent
    stalactites, then a rhino,
    red ochre on white rock, red
    dots like blood drops on a lion,

    owl, ibex, aurochs,
    an elegant running horse,
    these, the oldest known paintings
    on earth; bear bones strewn on the orange
    floor, Auragnacian fingerprints.

    What is rare and precious grows
    in dream light, in darkness, earth’s slave,
    the cavern of sleep. The human edge
    of holy, dreams may be packed
    with meaning, mass and presence.

    Among ancient souls the earth
    was created in dreamtime;
    sung by each telling its origin,
    its animals, plants, people,
    songs passed down and down.

    —

    Six years the editor of an award-winning children’s magazine, Sheila Cowing has also been a landscaper, a book salesperson, and hardest of all, mother of three daughters. She has published non-fiction and three collections of poetry.  She enjoys great views of two mountain ranges with her five-year-old cat and her aging hound.

  • Organ of the Soul

    Iphone Pics and Videos 007It’s cloudy and wet in Charleston today, the air swampy and pungent as is typical of August in this region. While I am still not used to it, I am less unused to it than I was three years ago when I moved here from Albuquerque. This morning, instead of taking my usual stroll around the neighborhood and down the bike path that runs through West Ashley, I opted for the treadmill at the gym where the air is at least somewhat controlled. I even followed up with 30 minutes of yoga before making a quick visit to the chiropractor for some therapeutic attention to what some call my “boulder shoulders”. I am blessed with a Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule this semester so can look forward to spending my Mondays much in this way — at least until Midterms when grading papers will take precedence over feeling good.

    Last week marked the beginning of the fall semester and was filled with last-minute revisions to class syllabi, office hours, and lesson plans. The early semester juxtaposition of high energy and intense focus sometimes makes me feel a little schizophrenic. Though I felt exhausted by the time Friday rolled around, I was charged from meeting this year’s new crop of students. I can already tell it’s going to be a great semester.

    I opted to teach two classes this semester so that I might focus on other projects, namely submitting poems and poetry manuscript to suitable markets. Though it means tightening my belt and cutting out quite a few extras (and not so extras), I think that the trade-off will be worth it, even if it’s just more time to write and submit. Up until this year, my submission activity has been pretty light. I will be buckling down this semester and getting my work out into the world.

    Meanwhile, poems for the 2017 Zingara Poetry Picks are streaming in at a nice pace and my community Creative Writing classes are going well. It’s great to be back in full-swing again.

    I want to share with you a few of the thoughts that are running through my mind grapes this day; little odds and ends – snippets that might deserve further development or investigation:

    1. I think it is Borges who is credited with the theory that the soul is contained in the voice, at least that is what David Isay, founder of Story Corps, said in an interview by Krista Tippet in the May 12, 2016 “On Being” Podcast. When I google the phrase, I also get “the human voice is the organ of the soul” from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I like both of these ideas, especially when  thinking about, and writing, poetry. I’m going to ponder it all this week.
    2. The law of attraction suggests that like things are attracted to one another. In the physical world, this phenomenon is observable in H20 wherein polar molecules are attracted to one another like magnets: water molecules actually glob on to other water molecules. In the world of human constructs, it also seems that wealth attracts wealth, privilege attracts privilege, and power attracts more power. From these observations our culture has developed the theory that positive thinking can attract positive experiences and lifestyles; that we can manifest the life we want. It makes sense that this theory is not confined to what we consider desirable circumstances. Isn’t it also true that poverty attracts more poverty, addiction more addition, and violence more violence? Manifesting something other than what one is experiencing in these circumstances, while possible, is no easy feat. The move from poverty to wealth, for example, or violence to peace, requires nothing less than Herculean effort.
    3. And finally, this : able-bodied-ness is a temporary state for pretty much everyone.

    That’s it for this Monday Minute. Leave your comments below and have an interesting, curiosity-filled week.

    Z-Poet

  • Amber by Jeanne DeLarm-Neri

    Before the boots wore out we found
    a vast ridge of desert hills to cross,
    villagers to meet, other hands to hold.
    We talk like we did at fourteen,
    tucked under blankets miles separated,
    at three a.m. Back then, the phone cord
    stretched to the end of its coil.
    We stayed quiet as mice in walls
    but not quiet at all – stop that scurrying!
    Sleep now. The unconscious has surfaced.
    Blood pumps DNA –it twists, dances.
    We’re ancients, you and I.
    The liquid of us received the fall of gnats
    and wasps – their wings fell into us,
    fossilized. These chunks of amber
    once flowed free. We forget how blocks
    form, how eons compress into the size
    of postal cartons till we feel the rush
    that made them, when sap oozed
    and plasma shimmered in its puddles,
    back when the exciting conduit transported
    the minerals of what we’ve become.

    —

    Though Jeanne DeLarm-Neri has written poetry and stories for her entire life, she also earns a living in other fields, particularly as a bookkeeper at a private school, and as a vendor of antiques. Her poems and short fiction have been published in two anthologies (In Gilded Frame 2013 and Poems Of The Super-Moon, 2015), and several literary journals, one of which, Slipstream, nominated a poem for the Pushcart Prize. In 2014 and 2015 she was a contributor at the  Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She’s currently working on a book of poems and a novel.