WATERMARK

a poet’s notebook

Established 02004

August 2009

August 6, 2009

unearth — RWP minichallenge I

the walls are filled with the lives of children what appears to be an exit changes to a trap you have everything to lose oil rainbows the water, a thin & dangerous sheen that pain you call love pulls you away there is no point in stopping in the middle of the mountain road an… Continue reading

Poems

poem, poetry, Read Write Poem
August 4, 2009

Flow

I sit in my shaded garden, watching the koi and goldfish feed. The house is closed against this heat, plantation shutters pulled across the windows. Every week my aunt baked two cakes in the wood stove, one with the yolks, one with the whites. Angel-food cake, sponge cake. Sue cut off her fingertip fixing the… Continue reading

Poems

poem, poetry, Read Write Poem

Ancestral (Artificial )Intelligence

I do not use AI to write. For me, writing is how I think, and I prefer to do it myself. If/when I post anything here that I suspect or know to be AI generated, I will tell you.

I have changed this from Artificial to Ancestral, after Abi Awomosu @ Substack. This medium was made with human history, human thought. All of it, bright and dark. It is ancestral.

Poems

Please do not assume that I am the speaker/ subject of my poems.

In these times of creative nonfiction and fictionalized memoirs, I think of the poem itself as true fiction: it is most likely not factual, but it must be true.

It is likely to be — it is best if it is — a truth I did not know before I wrote, and may not understand even then.

A poem is my way of discovering (dis-covering) what I feel; sometimes, what I think — but it is not necessarily biographical.

August 2009

unearth — RWP minichallenge I

Flow