Happy Pamela Poem--"Ornithology: Wild Canaries"

Blue Fifth Review--The Music Edition

"Ornithology:  Wild Canaries" is featured.  I'm so very pleased to have work in the world.

Believe it or not, it's a happy poem about bebop, Charlie Parker, Harvey Parker, and morning sickness in the Musical Ekphrasis issue of Blue Fifth Review.   Sam and Michelle are wonderful editors, and I'm very pleased to be a small part of such a fine group of writers and visual artists.

In other news, life goes on.  My California dreaming was a nice fling, but there were problems.  First of all, Italians and Russians have different temperaments.  One of us is passionate, moody, intense and a great kisser, and the other one lives in California and has vanity plates.  One of us wants more than anything to be famous, and the other one wants her own bed and her own garden and sunlight/starlight.  Who lives in California and blocks the view?  Who screens out the lights and the breezes in the evenings?  I'd much rather see the constellations than the stars at Graumann's Theatre.  

(After the Labor Day weekend, when I did learn so much about Dante and about what I do and don't want from a fling, I returned to Kentucky missing the crazy, passionate, possessive till it hurts Pretty Boy.  I understood him, and boy say howdy, as we say here in the Bluegrass State, the kissing was spectacular.  That's never going to be equaled).

Do you think, Dear Blogland, that I will ever fall in and fall in like with a normal person?  One who is intelligent and kind and also a good kisser?  One who likes me for my brain?

I wonder sometimes if I am not the 15 year old girl in this family.  That sounds just like an entry in a 1974 five-year-diary.  I still have mine, so maybe I should mine them for more details of my adolescent maunderings.


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Back...in Black and Coral and Tan

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So....I have been teaching and editing and traveling to Nashville and visiting California and having a passionate argument/affair with an insufferably opinionated Italian...and I have two great dresses and two great sets of classes to teach and the best new shoes on the planet. (These are my Venus shoes, because I felt like I could balance on the edge of a scalloped shell in them). 

I have enjoyed my time in the classroom and in California.  Now it's time to record it.

What's it like to come back to the page after a successful poetry reading, a job interview where you actually are offered a job for 2013 (more on that later), and a whirlwind affair in which you and your new black dress encounter the artiface and angst and awkward-look-at-me that is southern California? 

It's kind of good. 

It's kind of fun to be home. 

It's kind of fun to go. 

A crazy quilt of images wrapped around my shoulders:  Sangria and San Diego, the Star of India and the star-studded party where I met Julia's brother (who liked my accent), and a woman with the fakest of EEE breasts who hugged me to her cantilevered cleavage (and I bounced off like a kid from a trampoline).  Dante and discussion and movies and animation and animated discussion and anger and misunderstanding and airports and artichokes and avocados and archangels...

That new lover against that old heartbreak....breaking through those barriers. 

I'm awake now.  I miss Dez, I miss D'angelo, and I am ready to make Harvey proud by writing a novel.

I plan to stay awake. 

Dante Alighieri has it right, as he always does:  Ruppimi l'alto sonno nlla testa/Un greve tuono

(A heavy thunder broke the deep sleep in my head).

Before thunder, there is lightning..right?  I was struck, moved, changed by California.  I remembered why I loved San Francisco, why I both loved and hated San Diego, how pacific the Pacific really is, and how passionate the Atlantic really was...

I am ready to write a story that moves cross continent.  For that I'll need some mojo, some magic.

And these are my Mercury shoes...do you see that they are magic?