WATERMARK

a poet’s notebook

Established 02004

Family

October 26, 2009

My Mother

BETTY LOU JULIAN [BROGAN] SERR Betty Lou Julian Serr died October 12, 2009 in Chandler, AZ. She was born in Long Beach, California July 5, 1924, the daughter of Bob & Georgia (Kenney) Julian. She went to Montana as a baby with her parents and resided on a ranch near Clyde Park until the… Continue reading

Family

Betty Lou Julian Brogan Serr, Family, motner
November 20, 2007

Niki

Today I get to write, because Niki is going to the grocery store for me. Niki has been, steady and patient, in my life for twenty-eight years. She has outlasted my absences and withdrawals, my long silences and strenuous sulks. We’ve played together, at auctions and art shows; at second-hand stores and carnivals. We have… Continue reading

Family

friendship, mosaics, photo, photograph
October 1, 2007

Lost

Today I am grieving a once-loved child, now lost to drugs and psychosis. A child desperate for love, who could not be still long enough to receive it. Crank. Crack. Speed. Meth. These hard, harsh, one-syllable words — have you ever noticed that? — how they turn their users into harsh, hard, dangerous, one-dimensional people.… Continue reading

Family
June 7, 2006

Snapshot Poem 07 June 02006 — Mariah

The world having survived yesterday’s coincidence of numbers, I celebrate this day after your twenty-eighth birthday, watering the garden you helped to make, feeding the goldfish you worked to house, inhaling the many sweet scents of early summer, these exuberant blooms so like you in full flower, multi–petaled, colorful, brilliant, beautiful, mercurial, seductive,almost frightening —… Continue reading

Family, Snapshot Poems 2006

photograph, poem, poetry, Snapshot Poem
June 6, 2006

666

There are many cheerful things I could blog about — I have a list, including that today is GoddessDaughter’s birthday — but for some time now I’ve been distracted by a confluence in the news: many stories about this being 25 years since AIDS began to devastate our communities; and our Christian President’s call for… Continue reading

Current Affairs, Family, Personal

AIDS, bigotry, christian, constitutional amendment, discrimination, gay marriage, Politics

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.

Family

My Mother

Niki

Lost

Snapshot Poem 07 June 02006 — Mariah

666