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She Said and Women Talking examine the collective power of women’s words for a MeToo era.

Writing, the words wait in a line,
a row of polished stones

ready to be skipped across the lake.
That is their desire as well.    

If I am clumsy, my flung words gravelly,
jagged, they will sink like rocks.

Better, I’ll broadcast simple seeds,
words bursting from a ripe pod,

believing the wind will find for them
a soil rich enough to grow in,

to send up buds, flowers. Their meaning
hangs in the air—waiting for a light breeze.

Last year, my husband and I revised our wedding.

Our initial wedding was in October 2020, almost by accident. We had been planning on getting married then anyway and were halfway to planning the big traditional wedding, with the catering and the DJ and all the rest. Sometime around July, it started becoming clear that the world wouldn’t be cooperating with our plans.

you were there
tell me please
if you don’t mind
if it is no intrusion
upon what graced
their last gaze
the floor
a chair
the ceiling
after a yawn
a bible friend faithful
your face
perhaps your face
their last light
upon your face
as they read
to your face
other seed
fell among thorns

*Dylann Roof, before he murdered them, sat and listened to the
study of Mark 4 by the nine.

Iconoclasm isn’t just an expression of anger. It’s how we try to make new worlds. 

A novel posing as a memoir that is really a sympathetic comedy 

The bone-sore truth was that I envied them:
Two young friends sailing on their will, strong legs
Upright, unlike mine. Dawn’s lace above them,
Rose facades in back. The friends linked hands, posing
Wordless before the lens, their fanning white
Dresses stained blood red. Quick, thirty seconds
To protest a vain conquest—snap, snap, snap—
Before police bear down with rods. No one there
Dares call the war a war—nor talk of shells
And shallow graves. The chief brooks no dissent,

                                     . . . in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode . . .
                                             —The Prelude, Book VI

(digital collage incorporating photograph by Arsen Petrov and painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau)

When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, French artist Fanny Lechevalier Lafon saw an ever-growing, ever-present roll of news photos—a barrage of horrifying images that record the war’s toll and tragedy and continue to haunt so many of us. “I have been touched by these moving and terrifying images,” she writes in her artist’s statement, “feeling very frustrated and powerless as a witness of this tragedy.”

Patience is said to be a virtue. Said, at least, by parents to demanding children. But where does resigned passivity end and active patience begin?