L U M I N A * N O S T R I

 On Transubstantiation an exercise from Danusha Lameris using  Susan Firer's poem Transubstantiation  as a jumping off point. Enjoy I Before it is love It is just friendship. An agreement,  an exchange of favorites, time bound by two. But once it is love the binding melts. Everything is fire then. Time sizzles like a string on either end of the dynamite stick.  You are crackling towards the other now revelling in your separateness. He is not you you are not him, and oh how wonderful  that knowledge feels. Before the explosion,  the dynamite is a promise. A blowing apart of each separate timeline, a portal to somewhere new.  After the stick blows, there is a settling. A choice "Are we going to walk though?" After I hold my palm out,  it's no longer my palm. It's, a peach to be  carefully kept, lest it bruise, lest it spoil,  lest it rot. Before you decide where your palm will land,  it's a bird of prey, a peregrine falcon, in th...

  ON POETRY COLLECTIONS FROM THE LIBRARY As I open each offering I can’t help but be stunned. How are the pages still so white? The spines so unbroken? If this were mine, not borrowed, how I would dog- ear page after page, how I would crack each binding until the heart of it splayed open! I suspect this pristine condition a symptom of want for wear,  but then a flicker, something like hope sparks inside me, and I join a communion with the reverent.