Les Godasses Émile

 

My short-story “Les Godasses Émile” has been published in Lowestoft Chronicle, issue #61.  This is a nostalgic look at Paris, as you will see, and indeed a nostalgic look back on my part, remembering how sore my feet were after walking endlessly to see the famous sights, museums, bookstores, and cafés there, and once, in addition, all of the hoopla (tout ce tapage) attending the Bicentennial of the French Revolution and the crowds of le 14 juillet.

 

This is the third story of mine to have appeared in the delightful Lowestoft Chronicle, which celebrates both travel and humor; the others were "Octopus" and "Show Me the Bust of Marcus Agrippa."  Here's what some happy readers say about this quarterly online literary magazine—

 

“Reading Lowestoft Chronicle is like jostling through a sprawling bazaar in Tashkent or Ulaanbaatar, with eyes wide open and wits on high alert.  Invigorating, too.”

— Victor Robert Lee, author of Performance Anomalies

 

“What a delightful refuge the Lowestoft Chronicle provides, artful and clean, featuring sparkling writing in multiple voices—all of it strong, provocative, wry, funny, and wise.  I’m so proud to be part of it.  Add this marvelous site to your reading matter, travelers and armchair travelers alike: your world, and mind and heart, will get larger.”

— Joan Frank, author of All the News I Need and Because You Have To:  A Writing Life

 

 

 

image:  depositphotos, Vintage Paris

Gardens of Longing

 

Late in February gardens (at least in California) began showing new growth, and green sprouts, and our wonderful local Catamaran Literary Reader published a celebration of gardens of all sorts—Catamaran Vol. 13, 1: Special Garden Edition, 2025, Issue 47—

"In our Special Garden edition, we invite you to enter our pages consisting of literary works with settings that span from public gardens to imaginary gardens, themes of flowers, plants, and the organic world, in a narrative accompanied by a range of visual artworks exploring gardens from landscape and still life paintings to abstraction and realism." 

 

In my creative nonfiction meditation included in this special collection, "Gardens of Longing:  A Memoir in Stolen Cuttings, Hoarded Seeds," I hope I show how the gardens we plant for ourselves are a hopeful, wistful, always nostalgic mingling of longing and belonging, comprising the places and their essences we’ve lost, or on various journeys found.

 

"I cultivate a garden of stolen plants, the way the words of poems and stories in my rag-tag notebooks also make me what I want to be.  Cultivate, I see, comes from colere—also meaning inhabit.  Like sea creatures which inhabit others’ shells I borrow and then live inside a casing of inspiriting plants and trees for dapple and for shade, and tuck old worn stone figures among them, companions of my muse. This thieving reprehensible, perhaps, but something I can’t help.  It’s essential to who I am, and the telling of that.  I acquire plants the same way I buy books:  believing each will give me finally exactly what I long for.  My belonging and my home."

 

Here, in my always ephemeral garden in Santa Cruz, I find

". . . the salvias and herbs and weathered stone, upstart yarrow, geraniums in every shade of pink, a little St. Jerome with his lion and book—all [these] elements assure me that this, my seat under the lichened pine with just a scrap of ocean view, a passing dog, a junco searching through the tangled grass, and all those cherished scraps of other times, elsewhere, is exactly where I belong."

 

I'm honored to have this rumination featured on the Catamaran website, and it can be found here.

 

 

 

image:   Andrea Johnson, cover artist

 

A Nurturing Poem: The Dog’s Ears

 

The dog’s ears, furred, furled,

fitting both palms

like home-knit childhood mittens

on a snowbound day, a day

for chicken soup 

with noodles, rice, the green tang

of innocent celery, finely diced.

A day for Harriet the Spy

or Nancy Drew, 

a mound of covers, 

and this pert-eared dog on top, 

listening constantly

for words promising things, 

the faint but keenly studied evidence

of a pined-for and despaired-of 

return.  In the meantime 

I rub her velvet ears, and they in turn 

perfectly smooth my ruffled feathers, 

settle into calm my rocking boat.

 

image:  Regal Animal Hospital

A Nurturing Poem: Egret Lily

 

Egret or white lily?

The purity,

the grace of throat,

of form—

either or both,

that long siphon of beauty

drinking in the long lagoon.

If not still here tomorrow,

then egret it will have

proven to be.  Or maybe 

Calla still, stolen away, 

bestowed with flight.

 

 

images:  Don Enright, Eric Hunt

A Nurturing Poem: The Plant Next Door

 

Some kind of sprawling

big-leafed plant moved in next door—

from which of all distant jungles?  

Place of Monarchs,

place of resplendent quetzals 

(emerged from the Andes, related to 

a deity, naming a coin)?

A green anaconda, maybe, lurks

among the voluminous leaves,

not off in South America or Trinidad,

island of sugar, home of the shapeshifting 

Temple in the Sea:  dedicated to Shiva, 

then destroyed, then built again, before

being reduced to fragments by the tides. 

And built again!  Love and persistence

of such magnificence leafing, 

though far from jungles, in my heart.

 

image:  Spencer Wing, Pixabay

An Appraisal Poem: Progress

What is this mulish obstacle

blocking my path?

A foot, and a second . . .

planted implacably in place,

dogged as the most 

Brobdingnagian dog or 

torpid old Galapagos tortoise,

simply 

and with the fixed

proclivity of years 

disdaining to be moved.

 

 

image:  Galapagos Giant Tortoise,

         Intl Fund for Animal Welfare

 

Writing Spaces in the Kitchen

 

Old recipes:  hand-written tales on stained pages telling of kitchens past, and some of them on parchment paper, torn sheets folded maybe into neat packets.  Stolen biographies of far-away places and times, of grandmothers or unknown chefs in New Orleans or the countryside of Normandy, a friend nearby, a friend across the world but always in your heart.  Sensual stories from distinctive cultural settings, written again while mincing garlic and not mincing words.  That expressive ambiance of spices, those life-changing/life-commemorating stories in every ingredient and every taste to come.

 

This afternoon’s writing was in ancho chile powder, paprika, cumin, a rainbow of little tomatoes sprinkled with oregano (Mexican rather than Turkish), caramelized onions, snow peas, baby lettuces.  Black beans will show up in the final paragraph, as well as salsa fresca and that oven-roasted evergreen poblano which will have so much to say.

 

 

image:  Pixabay, Bru-nO