Sweet Potato Pie and I Shut My Mouth

Today I held 87 poems in my hand -- hot off the press -- I held 87 of my own poems in my own hand and had the incredible urge to cry.

I haven't had much experience with pride but today is the day I french kiss self-satisfaction. I might even get to third base. I held my poems in my hand. They aren't all great, most of them aren't even good, but they are mine. Each little word and line break hatched from intention. Each stanza a pick ax for mining my emotion with craft. Each a micro-universe. Each one breathing. And it's me, I'm the creator.

I can't stop touching the pages.

Today is pulsing.

Feelin' Myself

I put my bed by the window because why wouldn't I? Why not wake up and look right out to a virgin Vermont morning, Green Mountains in the background? Why not be taken with a baker's dozen of crow minding their own business against a hazy-blue sky?

Sorry I'm bragging again. But I can't stop.

This is hallowed ground. I feel like I paint it like this: writers and deer and birds frolicking and bonding around a crackling fire, a world where poetry is even more a blood line than usual - and other people acknowledge the importance while braiding a bear's fur... I mean, it's not REALLY like that, but kind of. And books stacked up to my knees wherever I walk. And (this is a truth) a Red Tailed Hawk living in the trees near my room. Chickadees screaming their names and hopping from branch to branch -- and me, a part of it.

When did it become a reality that I, a poor girl from flat-Indiana, might actually be a writer by way of the mountains of Vermont?

Amen.