Prompted by Magpie Girl, propagated by Lori-Lyn...

1. Leftover Thai food with new-steamed rice

2. Abstract Expressionist postage stamps

3. Australian tennis junkies drunkenly spamming my Twitter feed

4. After today's rain: my back yard is rich with the scent of honeysuckle and a good wet green

5. Excel. It makes my life easier in so many ways.

6. Flaxseed with coffee-flavored yogurt

7. Lovely feedback on a story

8. Antihistamines

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Some poems I've read through more than once this week:

Krystal Languell's "The Same Sound Every Night" and "Suddenness" at No Tell Motel. It's just coincidence, of course, but reading the latter after recent local events was almost a punch to a gut:

The moment just before disaster - not a siren
but the absence of a siren - when the sky is sick
green or sick yellow and all the muddy dogs are
called generously indoors: did we create this? ...

The Drunkenness of Noah by Kathleen Graber: "The truth is I often laugh when I don't know what else to do..."

Hiro Boga's Meditations from the Center: 2. Which prompted me to spend a part of today on this:

After the Floods (draft 2)

In a corner of my room, a rain-washed drawing
smudges its inky remains like a bruise
of feathers across the sticky slate of loss,

blank like the photos I couldn't save,
their emulsions bleeding endpaper echoes
onto holiday cards and time-bleached notes

from people themselves long evaporated
from everywhere except these mementos.
The more I stare, the more I am struck

by the splinter-thin blur
between grotesque wreckage
and beautiful ruin -

how a brown, crinkled scrap of a rose
can speak more of my worlds
than a dozen lush, satin-bright blooms

and how I want to be both
the history and the hope
a sweet mingling of dryness and dew.

How to be such and not too much?
Next to the picture, a pitcher: tell me
what to pour onto your palm.

~ m