I'm always a little nervous when a journalist wants to write up an interview with me - it seems we sound different when what we say is printed in hardcopy. Either the words aren't quite right, or they are exactly what we said and it turns out we aren't saying what we think we are. However, Jenny Luna, journalist for the Sierra Sun, did a spectacular job in her interview with me about Tangled Roots Writing, published yesterday in the paper. Thank you Jenny!
http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/northshore/nnews/7909053-113/karen-writing-tangled-roots
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
This poem of mine, published in Sierra Nevada Review a few years ago, was one of the funnest to write, and always gets a visceral response from its readers. What does it say to you?
Tamsen Donner Commits
Horrid Acts with Her Husband
“…the cabins, by order of Major Swords,
were fired, and with them everything connected with this horrid and melancholy
tragedy were consumed…”
-
Edwin
Bryant, with the Eastward-bound army
after conquering California, 1847
The
tent, canvas from the wagon,
a
pebbly texture sagging with ice, crackling
in
the cold night air.
Wind’s
monologue. Dead-cold trees.
From
within,
Tamsen
and her dying husband
watched
the layer of canvas
fearing
its failure,
the
loss of that distinction
between
inside and outside.
Storms
lasted ten days at a time.
Starving
so,
bones
show through
into
a new shape of the person.
Now
the body is the shape of what’s inside.
After
he died,
she
stroked his body, the bones
and
the tendons like wrapping twine
around
his femur,
his
radius and ulna.
She
dressed him. Then
she
undressed him
to
use his clothing to warm herself.
He
lay naked, under a threadbare quilt
(midwest
quilting socials, bills sewn
into
the squares,
that
hope like
scent
of freshly cut grass).
She
removed the blanket and
wrapped
herself in it,
gazing
and not
gazing. Was she still
the
woman who married him?
Was
he
in
death,
the
man she married?
Tamsen
licked his wrist, remembering.
She
used her teeth,
as
when he used to bite
little
purple marks into her neck.
She
nibbled along
the
inside of his arm - she felt most familiar
with
this part of him, what was visible
as
he worked,
what
touched her
when
he held her face
to
kiss her. Most familiar
and
most proprietary.
A
penknife was all that was needed
here
to slice out a piece
like
the curve of pink melon from its rind.
The
axe was used later
maybe,
to cut
the
bones. Her tongue
ran
across the inside
of
the inside of his arm.
Its
damp baby-pink
surprising
beneath the brown
paper
bag skin
as
if here
was
the man she married. Here
was
the untouched
part. She savored
the
hope of him,
in
the hard white desert of winter -
his
release from the packaging of his body,
and
for her, a surrender
to
the inside, the outside layers collapsing
inwards,
heavy
tent
walls sagging.
Silence
pressed
upon
her. She chewed slowly
to
make him last, the soft
pink
arm, her eyes closed
in
pleasure.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
