I’ve always loved the word apocalypse. Saying it engages most of the mouth. It ends with the tongue touching the teeth, the lips coming together and then being pushed open by the final p-sound. Like a kiss.  I nearly failed linguistics because I didn’t like the fussy nature of labeling sounds and movements of the…

Poems and wings, occasionally a burger. Let’s be honest, occasionally a burger AND wings AND poems. Holler Poet Series found me when I’d just begun to transition from writing bad slam poems to the shorter personal poems I’d learned about in Dan Howell’s and Erik Reece’s poetry classes.  A piece by Tom Eblen for the…

The year Abra was born, the year I was finishing up my Masters in Secondary Education, and the year I started teaching, I applied to twelve creative writing graduate schools. I had just found out such schools existed the semester before grad school. I had written my first short story and poem, as an adult,…

Goodreads says I’ve read 157 books of poetry, but I’ve never ranked my top 10 books of poetry. More than likely, if you asked for poetry recommendations you received one of these books. I haven’t figured the exact order, yet. Porcupine of Mind, Katerina Stoykova  How I Became an Angry Woman, Bianca Bargo   Render //…

In many ways, the divorce, or the feelings I confronted during the divorce anyway, were similar to those I felt after break ups in middle school, or elementary school even. Shame, embarrassment, confusion, shaky self-esteem, and an awareness of people’s reactions to what you say and do that is nearly unrelenting.  Here’s a memorable break…

This starts in a likely place, a library.  After school, on Wednesdays, I host a board game club at Lafayette in our school’s library. One of those Wednesdays, I purchased and brought a new game for the group to play. Modern Art asks players to bid on paintings by 5 contemporary artists; whoever makes the…

And, of course, Katerina Stoykova… Without them Open Burning wouldn’t exist. But also, in broader sense, the person I am today wouldn’t exist. Some years ago (I’m bad at timelines), I began working at Accents as an intern. My first project was working on Bigger Than They Appear: An Anthology of Very Short Poems. From…

Really the title of this post should be something like Open Burning: writing about divorce when you have the responsibility of raising a child with your ex and live two blocks away from one another and at some point you are going to want to date someone again who probably won’t want to deal with…

On Poetry Foundation