The Whispers of Work prompt jumped out at me because one of my favorite poems is Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and one of my favorite poetry collections, to which I frequently return, is Jennifer Fitzgerald's The Art of Work, and it so happens that my grandfather was an elevator operator. When I saw elevator operator on the list of extinct professions, I realized this was a poem for me.

I love "corresponding" with poets, borrowing lines, or trying erasure technique on other poems, as if I were in the same room, having a silent conversation. Just the idea of another human being looking over my shoulder as if to ask, "so, where are you going to go with that line?" changes the writing from scribbled thoughts to something to which I add extra polish.

“As above, so below,” we almost agree. But, from what I know of betrayal and loss, lies and regret, earthlings are drowning in themselves and I am done with them.

Q: What happened when the monkey scored the winning goal? A: The crowd went bananas. Q: How did the monkey start a flea circus? A: From scratch.

Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.

Journal Mining Prompt I mined my journal, chock full of my relationship with nature, in nature. I wanted to distill the quality and the relationship lyrically, with a song – a sonnet – lyric and inviting, to capture an ongoing leitmotif of the recurring experience, in dream and by streams, of feeling a part of the natural world. I’d like to be a stream, a rock in a stream, the ongoing and the static of existence.

The monkey shrank back horrified at these words and asked the jelly-fish what crime he had committed that deserved death.

According to the details for this photo, this was taken during 2020, the year of the Pandemic. Clearly we are doing our best to make Christmas merry and bright. I'd say, thanks to our oldest cat, it worked.

"Don't do that!" the man yells fearfully. "You'll find the gun in my glove compartment!"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning "My future will not copy fair my past"--I wrote that once; and thinking at my sideMy ministering life-angel justifiedThe word by his appealing look upcastTo the white throne of God, I turned at last,And there, instead, saw thee, not unalliedTo angels in thy soul! Then I, long triedBy natural ills, received the comfort fast,

I strung all my wrist watches together to make a belt. It was a waist of time. Thanks for explaining the word "copious" to me. It means a lot. I'd tell you a chemistry joke, but I don't know if I'll get a reaction.

However, it happened that an old and humpbacked shepherd passed the tree with his flock, and seeing the prisoner, he stopped and said to him, 'Tell me, my son why are you tied to that tree?' 'Because I was so crooked,' answered the young man; 'but it has quite cured me, and now my back is as straight as can be.' 'I wish you would bind me to a tree,' exclaimed the shepherd, 'so that my back would get straight.' 'With all the pleasure in life,' replied the youth.

Here, the oldest of our two cats contemplates her reflection and queries the meaning of life and identity. This was in a hotel I'd had found in Spartantburg that took during and one of our hurricane evacuations (sometimes called a hurri-cation). I don't recall which hurricane excatly because, after a while, all the named storms that come through during the eleven years we lived in Chalreston began to blur together. I could probably find it in my journals, though.

Winter in Pittsburgh, PA (not quite the Northeast, not quite the Midwest, but dark and cold nonetheless) is for building fires, reading epic novels, streaming new movies and old, knitting and embroidery, dreaming of spring--and spirits, completing jigsaw puzzles and, this year especially, playing Shadowdark with friends. My husband and I joined a Shadowdark game back in April when a good friend from a previous life texted an invitation.

from the Blue Fairy Book edited by Andrew Lang Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a little country girl, the prettiest creature was ever seen. Her mother was excessively fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her still more. This good woman had made for her a little red riding-hood; which became the girl so extremely well that everybody called her Little Red Riding-Hood.

We adopted the youngest of our two cats at the beginning of the pandemic, which makes her a little over five years old now, from a person who'd rescued her from the streets and took her and her litter mates to the vet for basic care, like immunizations and spay/neuter. Because of the youngest’s "colony cat" status, the vet who spayed her also clipped her ear to make it easy to know right away that she'd been fixed and wouldn't be recaptured should she ever find herself on the streets again, which I plan to prevent to all costs.

When the frost settles.

s a final note, should you accept this offer of publication, we will be informing all our submitters for this year in the next week, so if you wouldn’t mind waiting until we’ve done so to announce the good news far and wide, we would very much appreciate it!

A highway patrol officer tried to pull over a speeding car on the interstate, but the car wouldn't stop. He pulled alongside the car and was astounded to see that the old woman behind the wheel was knitting, completely oblivious to the patrol car's flashing lights and siren. The officer shouted over his loudspeaker, "Pull Over!" "No," the old lady yelled back, "it's a scarf!"

O-nami was immensely strong and knew the art of wrestling. In his private bouts he defeated even his teacher, but in public he was so bashful that his own pupils threw him.

My and Gary's reading for Rebecca Aronson's Bad Mouth Poetry Series in Albuquerque, New Mexico on September 6, 2025 at the Q Staff Theater was a long time in the making. We used to live in Albuquerque but relocated to Charleston, SC in July 2013 when Gary was hired as an Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston (and I was later hired as an adjunct) thus bringing to close my third and Gary's second stint living in our favorite city so far.