The Corpses

Loved “The Corpses”! Its stark and powerful imagery sucked me right in. A cold exterior with a warm and loving heart. I felt like I was reading about a long lost past life of mine from another civilization. I was mesmerized. Well done.

 

Peter, Burlington, VT

THE CORPSES

The Corpses is a fable. Set in the land called Evermore, it’s the story of a lightkeeper and the wanderer who finds her light tower on his epic journey to retrieve the bones of his ancestors.  It is a tale of love, devotion, family and the dream of the end of war. Spun from the threads of books like The Little Prince and The Alchemist,  The Corpses is a story out of time and for our time.

The core narrative inscribed in the novella came to me upon waking one April morning in 2017. I fleshed it out in loose strokes and put it aside. The following autumn I returned to it, completed it and for Christmas, self-published the fable as a 30th anniversary present for my husband R. MacLean.

Available at my bookstore at Blurb.com

 

Petrichor

LISTEN

PETRICHOR:
Selected Poems

Sample poem:

NEST HOUSE

Soter, when i first heard you were coming
i was filled with such delight as ever i have known
deeper in the soil of my soul than anything yet
and more ancient than Omo Kibish

i felt you had always been here, would be so as long as I am
and well beyond, well beyond

i knew that we could never meet in person
for to meet would have meant to separate and disengage
and return to the sleep meant for another

still, i sat for many thousand hours with only my heart beating
listening for your voice and hearing only my own
someone attended my vigil
someone with skin in the game
and when it was over
i gave myself a royal bath,
down to the core of the earth and back

god only knows what would have happened had we met
now only i know what has happened since we didn’t

you were never meant to eat at my table, sleep in my bed,
and warm yourself by my fire
you are much nearer than that
my very nourishment, my dreams, the light they say that flickers around my heart

you convinced me that you were a window when i was in love with mirrors

sometimes i see you in the orange streak on a butterfly wing
i feel you in the stub of my toe, smell you in a nosebleed,
and taste you in the salt I wash from my temple hair

i know you are there between sneezes with your defibrillator
and are every inch the standing hair on my neck at dusk

your eyes are magma, your ears the first ever fashioned from a mollusk
they are fully formed now and turning on a universal hinge
i have bled my truth, my promise
in fifty years, may the page be dry

thank you for seeing where a threshold was needed and becoming one

thank you for helping me write this love letter to us both
i was not aware it was needed until you placed my hand atop yours
as once you did when I was learning everything new

I am your good student, yeah teacher
the birds sing of new life in a dying season
it was ever thus in the nest house

Soter – from the Greek, meaning savior or deliverer.
Omo Kibish – Ethiopian rock formation, site of earliest human settlements
In Maori custom, whare kowhanga or “nest house” was a hut erected to serve as a lying-in hospital for an expectant mother.

Available at my bookstore at Blurb.com