My grandmother's perfect nails, buffed and well nourished,
made her large hands graceful, butter knife shining in the morning light
as she spread marshmallow fluff and peanut butter
in Wonder Bread she did not eat. In this memory, the tile glitters
in her stately illumination—she outshines
the ripe raspberries and folded linen towel.

When my mother was a girl, is this how it was? The same sweetness
between them, given but never shared together,
the same shine from my grandmother's calculated elegance?
Her tidy house, the rooms ordered and aired out
in the Pacific's frosted bloom: she watches from the beach
as my mother climbs cold waves, a solitary swim.

The bread in my small mouth was rich as cake,
somersaulting in my belly as my grandfather and I
walked to the lake to feed the ducks. Now, sometimes,
when I smooth my skirt or apply lotion to my face—
or in the kitchen when the butter knife catches the light—
I feel the sandwich there still, like a seed, a pearl.
from the journal ROCK & SLING: VOX II
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Pensive head shot of Lawrence Upton
Poet and Sound Artist Lawrence Upton Dies

"[H]e is probably best known for his collaboration with Bob Cobbing: from 1994 to 2000, he and Cobbing wrote and performed the collaborative visual poem Domestic Ambient Noise, which ran to some 2,000 pages and hundreds of performances. They also co-edited the groundbreaking Word Score Utterance Choreography (Writers Forum, 1998), a primer for the performance of visual poetry."

via THE GUARDIAN
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Title page to the King James Bible, published in 1611
What Sparks Poetry:
Martha Collins on Psalm 19

"One night when I was nine years old, when the stars and moon were shining brightly, my mother took me to the window and read the first verses of the 19th Psalm to me. That was a long time ago, so the version I heard was the King James, which is still....the translation I like to read. I was, as we would say now, blown away. I had heard and loved music all my short life, but I had never heard anything as beautiful as that Psalm."
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