Howdy! And welcome to Make Friday Write! I do have two recent publications to mention. The first is that my final photograph is now up in Corium Magazine. I say final because I haven’t been sending photos out, and well, I haven’t been taken many photos because my Canon G10 started taking what looked like ghost photos or something. I did do a lot of research and I finally decided to get a more updated phone that has a good camera in it instead of getting an expensive camera AND PHONE. I don’t know if I’ll take anything that will be publishable, or if I’ll find the time to start submitting photos again, but I am happy to have a new phone. I bought a Samsung Galaxy 2 Skyrocket. Don’t you love these names? It has an 8MP camera which isn’t as good as my old G10 but is still excellent for one on a cell phone. I can do some SLR things like ISO (100-800) but need to figure out how best to handle AV and speed without having those specific settings. Hmmmm<
The other item recently published is a poem in the online journal Assissi. It is published via ISSU so you have to dig in to find the poem. It is titled “Little Borders” and is in the book that will come out next year. Trying to decide with that book if I want to pull some poems from my chapbooks to put in there as well. I did that with Paper House but I’m not sure if I will with this one.
Here is the poem I have been working on this week after being inspired by poetry I was reading. That always ties together 
The Gate
-after James Cihlar’s poem in Smartish Pace
It started with a school project
without supplies or skills.
She thought of how her mother
and her mother’s mother
could sew so it was possibly genetic.
She cross-stitched lines
from Dante’s Inferno on cloth,
decided on pastel threads:
Abandon (tongue pink)
all hope (lint yellow)
Ye Who (grated green)
Enter Here (Chlorinated Blue).
And it was reinforced by the first
priest she’d ever seen, the one
he teacher brought to class
(a necessary middle man
to explain the conventions
of Catholicism necessary -
or at least helpful – for the study
of Algheri’s work)
to a high school Southern
protestant class. “No,”
he had to repeat, “we don’t
worship Mary. Yes we
are Christians..” She
was in awe of his calm
in the face of 48 teenaged
eyes accusing him
of blasphemy. It continued.
When she finally got her license
(third time’s the charm like
a biblical prophecy) she went
to a new church every weekend.
She compared the rituals -
so similar across the faiths
that she looked for the contrasts -
the different shapes of Jesus’ hands,
the number of hymnals chosen
over the length of sermon. And then
she remembered herself
playing church with her dolls -
never weddings – instead
she tried to make their little legs
bend into positions of prayer
way past the ability
of the limb’s design.
-
As always I want to hear what you guys think of what I am working on and I want to read some of what you are working on. Friday is the day to share Remember I will take down my poem and any work you post one week from today.
