I've been cross-posting here and at my other blog, avniously.blogspot.com. I don't know how many of my LJ friends still post here exclusively. I check back from time to time, but I'm primarily at the other blog now. I'll still be checking back on LJ, but I don't think I'll continue posting here. It's an abrupt end, I know, but this chapter is done ( Read more... )

 A list of words that means things to me:

Nurdle- Do not boil them for 8-10 minutes, or until they are al dente. Do not mistake the term for hip-hop slang for binge drinking. Nurdle is the scientific classification for plastic-ball things. When skin companies sell age-defying washes with "micro-scrubbers" they are actually waxy little orb- ( Read more... )

a teensy poem:

What the Fortune Teller Saw

I always want to roll over, want
to be rubbed, and is that so
wrong, to show
my skin to men
with scalpels in their eyes?

-- 3/28

Time gets away from me, especially when I feel like I'm just doing the same thing each week. The weather's warm now, and when I go in the back yard with my coffee I am amazed at how fast the plants have taken off. We put in a summer garden and D planted a row of sunflowers along the fence line. In the front, some ferns, and native flower bushes ( Read more... )

Sue Sylvester is my spirit animal. I sketch her as I watch Glee, and it fulfills me greatly.

See?


( Read more... )

Here's a draft of a sestina I'm working on. The sestina is a mean, mean mistress. But I love mean, difficult things. I will be really good at dealing with curmudgeons. I am good at dealing with crabby students. I especially love angry jar lids when, using nothing but my own will, I pop 'em like cherry cordials. I hope you like sestinas too. ( Read more... )

FIve Things and a Blank Verse

1) Walking up to the restaurant Friday, we passed a man who hollered, "I can see you don't mean that smile," to D, who called back, "Yes, I do-- have a good one," but the man responded with a magazine round of slurs stemming from his sniper training overseas. We kept walking, thinking about how great it was that we ( Read more... )

Editors Say the Same Thing My Brother Has Been Saying for Years

Stop telling us everything. Let the gangly barracuda
with its adolescent bling for scales be an electromagnet. Don’t chase
away its flashes swiping against the hull of an old Studebaker
rusting off Big Pine Key. Invite the monster in.

Capture a flame inside a glass bulb
and dive down there ( Read more... )

I used to get worked up about the new year for a few reasons: the cusp of my birthday, the reflective and self-improving spirit of the humble middle class, or maybe just that last larva of low-self-esteem I can't quite shake.

This new year, for some reason, I don't particularly feel any of those things. No, "I'm going to be a better ( Read more... )

Bapuji and I share a bathroom mirror as I brush my teeth and he combs his hair. His hearing aids are turned off so he can say what he wants without consequence.

With my eyebrows, I offer him a hair tie around my wrist. For you? He laughs, slaps my back, brushing thin white strands across his forehead.

You believe in new lives, reincarnation? ( Read more... )