On Wednesday, the 2014 SOMOS Winter Writers Series kicks off at the Harwood Museum featuring poets Lauren Camp, Cathy Strisik, and Natachee Momoday.
LiveTaos is pleased to get you in the literary mood by bringing you teasers of all the SOMOS Winter Writers Series events. We begin this week with Ms. Camp and Ms. Strisik, two of this week’s three featured poets:
Slow
by Lauren Camp
Eyes open, legs splayed in the powdery dirt,
she likes the cool of it, the dynamic surge
of just belonging to a place like this,
brown and barren and slow as rust.
She digs deeper with her toes and hums.
When the sun crests the kitchen window,
she catches fragments of light on her thumb
and drags her hand across her chin –
like buttercups.
This will be the year the piñons die,
the year the tamarisks stretch inches to the core,
the year she goes away
– and then returns
to find the worms still multiplying.
Maybe there is no final resolution,
yesterday is how it will be again tomorrow.
The earth will slowly crust into tenacious particles,
stillness cradled inside like a newborn.
Lauren Camp
Lauren Camp is the author of two poetry collections, This Business of Wisdom (West End Press, 2010) and most recently, The Dailiness (Edwin E. Smith Publishing, 2013). She writes two poetry blogs, “Which Silk Shirt” and “Notes to Cecil.” Every Sunday, she hosts “Audio Saucepan,” a jazz-inflected, global music/poetry program on Santa Fe Public Radio, KSFR 101.1FM. She is also an acclaimed visual artist. Online at www.laurencamp.com.
———————————————————————————————————————-
Village Welcoming
by Cathy Strisik
It’s how I remember
Maasai women dancing.
Unfamiliar, ancestral perhaps
hurt. Weighty beaded
necklaces inching them
forward, the feet’s bare
tales, flies decorating
their faces like raised tattoos,
my face turned west
watching rainclouds.
Cathy Strisik
Author of Thousand-Cricket Song, 2010, Cathy is currently completing her poetry manuscript, The Mistress. She is co-editor of the online journal, Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art.
See the full Winter Writers Series schedule here, and check back here weekly to meet more featured writers and read some of their work!