Christmas Shopping at the Liquor Store

We met between the cabs and the sirahs —

My old lover and I.

A hank of chardonnay-colored hair

Fell between the Prosecco and Aperol

As he peered at a label with a falconer’s

Eye and I tripped over the Budweiser

Horses into his arms.

If wine is poetry,

Old friends are run-on sentences.

Let them come and take us away.

Playing with words for Shay's Word Garden.  Her word list this week is taken from A Coney Island of the Mind by the late beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a favorite of mine, and also the owner of the famous City Lights Book Store. Visit her post this week to read his Junkman’s Obligato. 

 

And for the last dVerse of the year, a Meeting at the Bar, Zen Poetry. This was my Zen moment in the store before we went to the bar!  Happy Hoppy Holidays!!!

The Lake Superior Writer's Retreat

A small one-room cabin sits on top of a dune overlooking Lake Superior. Local legend holds it belonged to a writer. It’s not really a cabin, just a glassed-in lean-to which this writer supposedly built as a retreat. When walking the beach, you can see the top of the glass enclosure. Knowing the rumors of his mysterious death by drowning along with the sad truth that the dead have no privacy, I climbed the dune to see what the inside of a writer’s cabin overlooking a vast body of water looks like.

 

A grill sat beside the door next to a weather-beaten bench. I pressed my face to the glass. The inside was cluttered and desolate. It wasn’t at all cozy, as I had envisioned, only abandoned and sad. A crookneck lamp sat on a table beside the window but nothing else beyond clutter was recognizable. Nothing to indicate a writer ever worked here. No reams of paper, no lost manuscript, no rejections taped to the wall. Who were his heirs to let this writer’s retreat fall into ruin? What did he write? Poetry? Murder mysteries? Ghost stories of the lost at sea? Lake Superior never gives up her dead, but still, I envied him his writer’s retreat on the top of a dune.

Written for Poets and Storytellers Friday Writings, whose only stipulation is that we include the word cozy in whatever way feels right.

This is a true story. 

Salvador's Ashes and Snake, the story of an indentured boy.

This is the new issue of the Slippery Elm Literary Journal. Pretty, right?

I'm happy to have a short story and a poem included.

As we descend through the clouds

fires dot the rising landscape. Smoke spirals up

and an odor fills the cabin . . . 

Yes, I can't resist tooting my horn, though it's what we writers hate more than anything.

The comparison is a stretch, but I loved being in the marching band, the group better than the individual, the precision, synchronization, and reward of belonging to something bigger than the self. That's what it feels like to be included with other writers more accomplished (all those MFAs) than myself.

Should you want to take a peek, this is the link. https://slipperyelm.findlay.edu/buy-a-copy/

Thank you for reading. Now I'm off for more coffee  to offset this cloudy, dismal (no snow) December Michigan morning.