It's Arrived!

My poetry chapbook, Stars and Strangers on Finishing Line Press is now available! You can find it at Finishing Line Press or order it on Amazon.

If you'd like to hear an interview between me and Kimberly Nunelly (formerly Kim Beyer-Nelson) on her new radio show, Deep Communion out of Michigan, hear her great laugh and my answers to her probing questions, go to: http://www.artistfirst2.com/ArtistFirst_Kim_Beyer_2016-12-21.mp3. We talk about my life and mystical experience at the beginning of the 12/21/16 radio interview. Near the end we talk about my book and I read the poem, "Prodigal Body" from Stars and Strangers.

Speaking of that chapbook, here is another poem from that collection:

Man Over...

we hear midst ferry bells and sirens.

The crew looks deep and brief in each other’s eyes,

run fumbling with straps of life jackets and rafts.

Hearing, He’s over here! we lean over the rail and see

a diver, staring through his mask beyond us, limp,

buoyant; he slips like water over each wave as hands

and feet wave with the current next to the grebe,

who pay him no mind. He’s dead, says my husband.

My thoughts scramble to reverse the verdict.

Where’s a life ring?! Where’s that life boat?!

Where at least is one person in the water?

to keep this man company, see that he might

yet breathe?! I question if it should be me.

I begin to accept his fate and wonder what he sees,

perhaps himself from above, peaceful and open

to the sky. We watch crew drag him on the raft

then speed him to the shore where EMTs peel his suit,

black rubber to white skin, cover his mouth to receive

air his lungs do not receive. I wonder if angels or dead friends

greet him, if he now swims up, if there is an “up”.

In the seeing, intimacy clings and now connected

to this man’s death, I become midwife at his birthing

into the beyond, hold the slippery mystery, this

everyday once-ness of each person’s life.