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

  READ YOUR TEACHERS’ WORK I was today-years-old give or take a sleep or two when I realized I should go back and read my teachers’ work. Volumes of their poetry float about my room, cobwebs in the corners let alone for nearly a year now. But how to get through the first one whose heartbreak makes me so jealous I could spit? Or the second whose luckless lot has been spun so sharply the book burns  my finger tips with every paging turn?  Don’t get me started on the third whose written every poem there is inside me. Every single one, especially those I am too afraid to write. No other poetry is more pressing than that of my teachers, but these old masters spare no sugar. Every word and not word is salt.

 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...