Story Inspired by Rocky J. Colavito Out on Alien Buddha

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The Alien Buddha After the Alien Buddha, with Chicago and Lake Michigan in the background. Taken by me, 19 June, 2026.

Back in the spring of 2025, I believe, this volume came out. I was deep in moving prep and didn’t get my hands on a copy until after we’d relocated, by which time I was deep in Victor Hugo work. So now I’m writing about it. Red Focks, the editor for Alien Buddha Press, put out a call for people who had published with the press to write pieces inspired by other authors who had done the same. I was assigned J. Rocky Colavito‘s quirky mystery stories about Vinnie Dark, the actor who plays LunkHead, the dumb guy in a low-budget version of the Annette Funicello-type beach party movies. He’s smart and solves mysteries, and Colavito’s Seeks on the Beach collects several of them.

Although I thought Red might have given me this to try to get some cross-genre energy going, since my publication in this project is a poetry collection, I kept wanting his characters to interact with my small-town Kansas detective, Sherri Holmes Hudson, who solved The Case of the Careless Cat with the help of her cat, Watson. So I wrote an update on the world of Vinnie Dark. In my story, set in the present day, Sherri finds that her signature LunkHead bucket hat from his film, Bikini Magic has been replaced with a forgery. She and her nephew Baker, a beach party movie fan, must find out who took it and why.

The backstory of the hat is that Sherri’s mother went out to Hollywood before marrying Mr. Holmes, hoping to be a starlet. She boarded with Vinnie Dark’s grade school teacher, Miss Lassiter (a Colavito character), who was strict, but had a heart of gold and a loving admiration for her former star student, Vinnie. After helping Sherri’s mother realize she really wanted to go back home to Kansas and teach school, which led to Sherri’s existence, Miss Lassiter was tragically murdered, which you can read about in Seeks on the Beach. In her will, she bequeathed her treasured hat to Sherri’s mother, whose children revered it, Miss Lassiter, and LunkHead.

Also involved in my story are Sherri’s high school boyfriend Garth Streeter, the police detective in Wynton, Kansas, where Sherri lives, and the Inspector Lestrade to Sherri’s Sherlock. A beach movie film festival is coming to the Wynton Library auditorium, and glamorous impresario Anna Giovanese has come from Hollywood to present it, in the process captivating the impressionable Streeter. She is also trying to revive her father’s Italian restaurant, a location for a scene in Seeks on the Beach. It had movie memorabilia on the walls, and Anna has put up an entire collection of LunkHead hats on the walls of her new restaurant. Just FYI for any cat-lovers out there who may be wondering, Watson also appears in this story, interacting with this femme fatale and watching a cat in a beach party movie.

Suspicion falls on Sherri’s house painter, Luis Gonzalez, who was painting the house while Sherri was out of town, but Sherri isn’t buying it. She and Baker solve the mystery in time for the opening of the festival, and Vinnie Dark assists, even appearing to help introduce the beach movies–though online, due to his advanced age.

That is “The Many Hats of Vinnie Dark: A Sherri Hudson Mystery” in a nutshell. I had a lot of fun writing it. I liked extrapolating from the details and characterizations in Colavito’s work, and I enjoyed having Baker use teenage slang gleaned from my son, who teaches high school. Also, I sometimes think I might do a whole book of quickie Sherri Hudson mysteries. I love her. (Okay, she’s a bit of a Mary Sue. So what?) I did have to cut the story a lot to fit the word limit, and I would edit it if I put it out again somewhere, but J. Rocky Colavito friended me on Facebook and told me he loved it, so mission accomplished.

I want to thank Red Focks for giving me this opportunity and also say that Alex Shenstone was spot-on in his own poetic take on fascism, humanity, and the natural world, written in response to my collection, The Great Garbage Patch. I believe The Alien Buddha after the Alien Buddha is an ongoing project, so keep an eye out for more.

Finally, whereas Dennis Kam‘s work tied in nicely with my poem about the elephant who listens to classical music in a nature preserve, the work of David Maslanka has nothing to do with beach party movies or mystery stories. Also, I have gone on long enough. I will try to fit my discussion of Maslanka’s award-winning compositions in next time.

“New Bridge at the River Kwai” Out in Russell Streur Anthology and Other News

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Sunrise over Lake Michigan. Taken by me. 22 Dec. 2024.

This was a draft I did that never made it into the blog because of Mr. Hugo’s demands on my time. I am over the trauma of moving that led me to look into Dad’s legacy as a teacher of composers, but I remain interested in them, so I think I will finish off with all the ones I can remember in future posts. As you can already tell, they are quite remarkable in their variety, so I hope you will click on the links and explore as the spirit moves you. Without further ado, here is a thank you to Diane Sahms at North of Oxford, for publishing my poem, “New Bridge at the River Kwai,” and a tribute to Dennis Kam, composer.

I am proud that “New Bridge . . . ” is included in The Russell Streur Nature Poetry Anthology I at North of Oxford. I really like this poem, which I believe combines several strands of my interests in a meaningful, moving whole. These strands are nature, specifically elephants; music, specifically Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata; exploitation and abuse, as suffered by nature, Beethoven, and elephants; neuroscience; and healing. The poem is essentially an ekphrasis of a video of pianist Paul Barton playing the “Moonlight Sonata” for an elephant in a preserve near the Khwae Yai River (the actual river misidentified as the River Kwai in history, novel, and film). The poem was rejected a fair amount, which surprised me a little because I think it is one of my better efforts, but when I submitted it to the Russell Streur anthology, Poetry Editor Diane Sahms accepted it long before the deadline, suggesting that she also saw something special and moving in it, for which I am deeply grateful.

I did not know or even know of Russell Streur or his work before reading the submission call for the anthology, but his bio evokes an extraordinary person, dedicated to saving what is most important and most endangered in our current moment–not only our natural world but in ourselves, our feelings, and our outlook. From what I have read, the poetry in the two volumes dedicated to Streur reflects his empathic respect for nature, gently holding it up to the light while maintaining a respectful exegetical distance. I am honored to be part of this legacy.

To continue my exploration of those students of Dad’s who corresponded with him, I therefore choose Dennis Kam (1942-2018) to conclude this post. According to John Van der Slice, in the early 70s, Kam’s music took a turn away from a Western, teleological bent disrupted by modernist effects and toward an exploration of different perspectives within an “extended focus” on a “unitary music ‘object,'” with an emphasis on “the palpable present.” This turn was motivated by minimalist trends in concert music, Kam’s interest in painting (a temporally static art), his Christian faith, the environment of Hawaii, where Kam grew up, and possibly the Eastern traditions to which he is linked by his ethnicity.

Like Streur’s, then, Kam’s work embodies a stillness in which one approaches the moment and the objects in the moment with respectful, perhaps prayerful, empathy, constantly keeping the self, with its greed, instrumental rationality, and projections, in check. That Kam, like Streur, saw this as crucial in our approach to nature is explicit in his piece, Forever Everglades. Other works may be accessed through the website dedicated to him and linked above on his name, or simply by doing a Google search.

Where Did I Go?

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Book cover based on sketch by Victor Hugo himself. 14 July 2021. Wikimedia Commons. PD. Gavroche is a noble street urchin.

A few years ago, I taught Les Misérables to two Korean kids, ages (as I recall) twelve (the boy) and fourteen (his sister). I had only seen the movie of the musical. In high school, I had tried to make my way through Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (popularly referred to as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) but did not succeed. Despite my stint in third grade outside of Paris, subsequent years of French studies, and a Ph.D. in English from Yale, I went into this project pretty much an ignoramus.

On the other hand, my mother had instilled in me a belief that every word of an author should be respected (if worthy), so I told the kids, whose mother had selected the novel, that we would have a stab at the unabridged version. I used my husband‘s excruciatingly precise Charles Wilbour translation, originally published in 1862 and put out in the 1960s under the auspices of the Modern Library. The kids used the Norman Denny translation on Penguin. (There is now a new translation available on Penguin, just FYI.) The Denny translation looked bloated enough. I told them it was fine. Later, however, I noticed that the students seemed to lack some of the text as we went along, while other large chunks of text had been misplaced in the back.

I do not need to tear Mr. Denny a new one here because in a few choice sentences, Graham Robb does so in his Victor Hugo: A Biography. Suffice to say, in the introduction to his translation, Denny brags about his cavalier judgment calls regarding Hugo’s “digressions.” He also boasts that he abridged the whole text as he went along, though he coyly declines to tell us where. He doesn’t need to. It is enough for us to know that he has understood the spirit of the novel better than the author himself.

So here’s how this went. The siblings had separate lessons. The girl pretty much did not do the reading, as far as I could tell. She seemed to be reaching a rebellious phase. I didn’t really blame her because the novel is difficult and gargantuan, and she had a lot of work besides. I just dragged her along as best I could, forcing her to read at least some of the text by asking questions and waiting a long time for her answers, and by assigning essays, as mandated by their mom. The boy did seem to be engaged. He had a marked talent for literary analysis and had already produced a wonderful parody of The Grapes of Wrath earlier in our work together (N.B., this was pre-AI, and I’m confident AI can’t do that anyway).

Meanwhile, I became fascinated by the novel. I spent hours looking up every reference I didn’t recognize, which was an embarrassing number, and I learned a lot of French history I should have learned already but hadn’t. Mired in the Trump era, I found Hugo’s audacious attempt to create a democratic utopia especially amazing and compelling, and I loved sharing this excitement with a precocious twelve-year-old. (Interestingly, a recent Borowitz Report has compared Trump to Hugo’s arch-nemesis, Napoleon III.)

So a few years later, when my husband’s friend and co-editor kindly invited me to contribute to a handbook on literature and identity the two of them were putting together, I chose to “do” Les Misérables. Unlike my earlier contributions to various collections my husband has done, this did not go smoothly at all. First, I was granted an extension from the outset because we were moving–which, as I believe I have indicated in an earlier post, was traumatic (but so worth it in the end). During this time I did quite a lot of haphazard research, mostly on the internet, and discovered some cool historical background that no one, as far as I know, has discussed before.

But when I finally had enough serious research under my belt to start serious writing, I found it hard. Everything in the novel is related to everything else. I couldn’t organize the material or cope with the word count for the essay, and the first draft I at last produced suffered from a disastrous lack of focus. With some help and a violent, though kindly-meant, kick in the pants from my husband’s co-editor, I at last got the thing into acceptable form and am quite proud of it. (I did my own translations, by the way, in consultation with Wilbour.) I believe the piece will be out sometime next year.

In the meantime, however, between moving, enjoying Chicago, and having Victor Hugo move into my head and live there rent free, I stopped blogging almost stopped submitting (though not writing). Since my amicable divorce from the Romantic French writer, however, my life has settled down as much as it can in this wonderful city. I have actually published a couple of poems I’d like to write about here, and I’ll be sending more out, so stay tuned.

Thank you for your patience.

From All My Children to Omniphony

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Continuing my journey of discovering music by my father’s students, we begin with the old All My Children theme, written by Jim Reichert. In college a friend turned me on to the show, and I watched it through a couple of years of college and off and on through grad school and beyond until my daughter required my attention more urgently. That was okay, because by then it seemed to me that it had cycled through all its shopworn plots and was just repeating them with new characters.

I’m not sure whether I knew of Reichert’s involvement with the show’s music or not. A letter he wrote to Dad reminded me that I met him (he said I was “a doll”) in the 80s at Carnegie Hall, when I was in an orchestra accompanying the Oberlin Choir on tour. In earlier letters, he mentioned his Emmy nominations and win for his work on the show. He was teaching with David Diamond, at the Manhattan School of Music, I believe, and wryly presented his accolades in contrast with Diamond’s successes in the more serious music world. I kind of think Dad, who knew vaguely (as he knew many things not musical) of my obsession with the show, told me about Reichert’s work on it when he told me one of his old students might be coming backstage, but I have no clear memory of any of that.

Anyway, I consider the opening iconic, even if not serious, music. Its emphasis on strings and orchestration is right out of the playbook Dad used when writing and arranging Muzak, and it has a powerful earworm quality. It is also appropriate to introduce a post about my ghazal, “Cosette’s Garden,” being up at t’ART Online (still a bridesmaid there) because metaphorically, my works are my children, and this blog, which occasionally brings up my actual children, is where I recycle the shopworn plots of my aspirations for all my children and their tribulations, from conceptualization through their struggles in the outside world.

The ghazal kids, one of which I mentioned here, were created in response for a call from Rattle, and even though that publication had no use for my efforts, I was happy to learn a new form and liked several of the ghazals I wrote quite a bit. “Cosette’s Garden” is inspired by the full-text version of Victor Hugo‘s Les Misérables, and specifically by his poetic description of the garden where she meets secretly with Marius. I think my poem is musical and moving, though I may be swayed by my admiration for the novel. Many thanks to the t’ART team, and please go check out all the fascinating work they are doing.

Speaking of fascinating work and the wide variety of commercial and aesthetic creations artists produce, I will close with Omniphony I, a serious, collaborative composition between Tod Dockstader and Jim Reichert that he sent to Dad on a record, with a letter saying he was proud of it for the reasons given in the linked material. I agree that it combines conventional compositional and instrumental technique with electronic experimentation in an original way, and I am intrigued to hear what I perceive as some of Dad’s drama and orchestration technique in a fresh (for 1967) sonic setting. Enjoy or be outraged, but if you give it a little time, you’ll hear some beautiful fragments in Omniphony.

Photo credit: WTillman451, All My Children Logo. 15 August 2018. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Friendship Poem Up on AUUF Website

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Saverivers, The Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Auburn, Alabama. 23 Dec. 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Released into PD by author, who grants all rights for any purpose.

The Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church, above, was built by freed, formerly enslaved people. When their congregation became too big, it passed, via the historical society, to the Unitarians–who at some point became Unitarian Universalists. We are a friendly, inclusive bunch, so it should come as no surprise that a recent service focused on friendship. Our minister, Reverend Marti Keller, requested writings on the topic, and the prompt resonated with me, perhaps because my best friend in Auburn is sad that I am leaving–and I am sad to leave her, too.

Never being one to follow directions, I paid no attention to the suggestions supplied with the prompt but simply wrote an honest poem about my friend, who is an amazing person and very different from me. I previously wrote about her and included a picture of us here. To my surprise, Reverend Marti featured my poem and had it put up on a special section of the Auburn Unitarian Universalist Fellowship website. This meant a lot, since she is a writer herself. Also, having my poem read at the fellowship and posted on its site probably guarantees me one of my largest audiences ever!

And even though I was honest and not entirely flattering to my friend (or myself), she was very pleased that someone had written a poem about her (the initials in the title are inspired by Elgar’s Enigma Variations). So that was all right, and I hope you will read and enjoy it.

Speaking of all right, which I will continue to spell that way (pet peeve), at the end of last post, I meant to share some of the music of Dad’s students, which I enjoyed discovering while reading their letters, even though most of them are dead now. But I got sidetracked by my own work and forgot, so I’m linking to a piece I’ve been playing lately because it’s upbeat and happy, as its uncredited arranger, Joe Clonick, seems to have been, and the dissonant chords in the transition remind me of Dad’s music, and it’s kind of a genius arrangement.

Joe Clonick sent Dad the record this piece is on, but I never heard it, and I just packed it away because I’m not sure the stereo works anymore, and I didn’t feel I had time to try it. Luckily, someone else put this piece from the album up on YouTube. Without further ado, here’s Surrey for your listening pleasure.

Back Again

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The Alien Buddha’s Big Backpack Full of Soup Cans (Soup for Our Family): Malcontent Poems, [ed. Red Focks]. Alien Buddha Press, 2025, against an amazing quilt by Cindy Reinke.

Journey to the Underworld

I’ve been gone for a lot of reasons. First, I was working on my novel, tentatively titled “Happily Ever After.” Then I had a flurry of violin gigs, and around the same time the exigencies of moving reared their hydra heads. Now I am full-on sorting and packing 24/7, except at the moment I have a tiny bit of downtime.

The difficulty of sorting is due not only to the mountains of books our family of readers has accumulated over several generations. I am making my heroic (or quixotic) way through my grandparents’ heavy-handed moral, sentimental, and religious tomes, my aunt’s poetry collections, my father’s instructional musicological texts, as well as some literature by his friends and acquaintances, my mother’s art historical and Egyptological books, an assortment of children’s books from multiple generations, my daughter’s complete works of Tennessee Williams, together with a good dose of Carson McCullers, my son’s history and film collection, and my husband’s and my own English Ph.D. libraries. 

More time-consuming are the mountains of letters. Thank goodness for the evanescence of the telephone and the email, or I would never be finished. It’s not just that there are so many letters, either. There are a lot. For example, I sent the Center for American War Letters about 160 communications between my grandmother and my grandfather in World War I, and there’s more material from World War II in the next generation. But that was primarily a sorting problem, since I had read a lot of the letters before. The hardest thing is reading the letters that resonate with me emotionally in a painful way. It has been especially painful to spend so much time in the mid-twentieth century. I know American life was far from perfect. Oberlin was a privileged community, but more for white males than anyone else. Nevertheless, my mother, my father, and every one of my father’s colleagues, fellow artists, and former students who corresponded with him were talented, interesting, engaged and energetic people, dedicated to culture and civilization. It is hard to read of their deaths and to think of the aspirations of the world of my childhood all come to naught as we enter an age of fascism and ignorance.

Adding to this sense of tragic loss is the feeling I get disposing of Dad’s musical scores and those of his students and colleagues. To be clear, almost all of Dad’s scores are archived at the American Composers Alliance, and I am not throwing out any that aren’t. The students, friends, and colleagues took responsibility for their own scores, I hope. Still, since Dad had to hand-write every note and hand-copy each part for his works, and they and a few recordings are all that is left of the art he dedicated his life to, it’s hard to watch them go. I feel similarly, though not as intensely, about throwing out my mom’s laboriously collected and organized slides of art, even though that material is readily available on the internet now.

Return to the Land of the Living

Once when we were visiting my husband’s history-buff uncle in Nebraska and went down in the basement to look at pictures of the old family farmhouse, along with old newspapers and V-mails, the uncle’s wife stuck her head around the door at the top of the stairs and announced, “If you’re ready to return to the land of the living, lunch is served.” I will now throw a similar bucket of cold water over my own head and return to my attempts to carry forward a cultivated, civilizing (in all the best and none of the colonial or racist senses) legacy.

I am, however, quite behind in chronicling these attempts. Despite my distractions, I have produced stuff, and things have happened in my writing life. I plan to describe all this in briefer posts going forward, so here I will just call attention to my poem, “Power,” which is in the “soup can” complaint anthology linked under the picture at the top of this post (thanks, Red Focks). In my poem, Power is presented allegorically as a bad internet dating hookup. As Power persecutes both the narrator who summoned him and a person described initially as “a bum,” both the “bum” and the narrator are humanized. I like what I did there.

If you are likewise feeling discontented with anything going on in our world, pick up a copy of that anthology and connect with fellow metaphorical soup-can throwers. You are not alone.

Featuring at Time to Arrive Open Mic

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Ben Grey, Microphone on stand in front of blurry background. 5 June 2010. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

I would like to go to more open mics, but I also need time to live and write and whatever. Since I found out about them, which took a while, I have occasionally gone to the live open mics here in Auburn, but they often conflict with my schedule. Since we are moving, I have not reached out to the local poets as much as I would if I were just retiring and hanging out here, so the online open mics are it, at least until we are permanently in Chicago.

Another reason I don’t do many open mics is that my poetry output seems to be slim compared to that of people who regularly attend workshops and have really thrown themselves into the poetry fray. Although I had fun at the LazyDaze LIVE! Prompt Writing Workshop in Austin and with the online Prose Poetry Workshop I tried recently, and although I believe I produced some good work at both, I have also been in workshops that made me ask, “Why are we here?” For me to be comfortable and productive at a workshop, the facilitator should show me something I don’t know, and everyone should be friendly. I think being slightly stoned at Lazy Daze also had a positive, loosening effect, but that is not required. Since workshops that I know will stimulate me to produce things and think about my poetry from fresh perspectives do not grow on trees, I tend to write poetry when inspiration strikes, which is much more rarely than it seems to be for my poetry colleagues. I don’t want to go to open mics and read the same old things over and over.

Between teaching, playing, and trying to move out of our house, on the one hand, and my under-production of poetry, on the other, I have wound up attending most often two open mics that fit my schedule: Poetic License Global Open Mic, which takes place on the first Sunday afternoon of each month online under the auspices of Janet Kuypers; and Time to Arrive, which takes place every Tuesday evening and is hosted by Dane Ince. Neither minds if I have only my novel draft to read from, or even an occasional piece on the violin, instead of a poem. It’s okay, too, if I have rehearsal or teaching and can’t show up.

At Poetic License, Janet is always the host and the feature, because one of the purposes of the gathering is to showcase her work as poet and publisher. I don’t begrudge her. The group is usually small, so there is plenty of opportunity to read, and the other poets and artists of various kinds are friendly and supportive.

But there’s no opportunity to feature. At Time to Arrive, there is always a 15- to 20-minute feature, and often the poet is impressive and inspiring. I was somewhat envious of those who had that opportunity, but I didn’t necessarily feel I was worthy of the honor. Because of my music schedule and frequent travel, my attendance is desultory, and many people, not just the features, seemed to write stronger poems, than I, and more of them.

So I was pleased and surprised when Dane issued me a “standing invitation” to feature. I was also mired in a concert that was hurting my back and stressing me out. I thanked him and told him I’d have to talk about it with him the following week. A few days later, he informed me he had scheduled me for that week.

After the concert, I got together a 20-minute reading of poems and prose about my life that progressed thematically from birth to death. I’m a good reader, generally, and Dane was very encouraging about how it went. The other people said some nice things, too, so I feel I’ve successfully reached a milestone in my poetry journey, though I still have a long way to go.

I will share the recording if I ever locate it. My computer here is old (I’ll have a new one when I move), and I am near or over my iCloud storage limit, so if the recording came out and was stored, it’s anyone’s guess where (yes, I’ve looked in Documents). I’m hopeful it will come to light when I transfer the files from the old to the new computer. But the important thing is, I featured, and I will feature again sometime.

“Dear Granddaughter” Accepted for Wordrunner eChapbooks

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jenny818, me and nana. 12 August 2009. flickr. CC BY 2.0.

I do not want to be the kind of wouldbe grandmother who puts pressure on her kids. An Indian boyfriend once told me that if a young couple had no children in his country, older women in the family would not hesitate to pull either one of the young people aside and say, “So, any trouble in the bedroom?” We broke up for other reasons, but his vignette has lingered in my memory as an object lesson on how not to be. I especially want to avoid it because during the dancing at my daughter’s wedding reception, one of her Zambian-American groom’s older female friends and relations came up to where I was sitting and, bending down, said, “Our people like to dance. But we will really dance when they have a child!”

Once my daughter and son-in-law brought it up, I did admit to some excitement about the possibility, but I try not to put pressure. It is a matter between them, none of my business unless they want to share something. Also, I am an adult with a full life. I do not need other people to do things for me so I can complete myself.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but have a few dreams and ideas on the subject of hypothetical future grandmothering. So I wrote them down as an automatic writing exercise for my prose poetry workshop, and later saw in the Wordrunner eChapbooks newsletter that its editors were looking for submissions to their second issue of microprose. As I recall, they wanted stories of no more than 200 words with strong characters and plots. Tall order. At the end, seemingly as an afterthought, they said they would also consider prose poetry.

I had some doubts, as I usually do in these cases. Would the editorial team really go for what I feel is a poem that has pretty archetypal characters established mostly by a strong voice and some details about their activities, activities that seem more like a list of things one might do in Chicago than a plot? I was fond of the piece, but that might be a personal thing that wouldn’t translate to readers. Besides, I had written it automatically. How good could it be?

Luckily, I had just read it among friends and gotten a positive reception. So I submitted the piece. I am happy to say that Editor Jo-Anne Rosen not only accepted it but called it “this gem of a micro.” All of which is reassuring, especially because I have been rejected from this venue at least once. Thanks to Editor Rosen and the Wordrunner team! I am happy to have found my grandmother dreams a healthy outlet.

“Swimming at Villa Copenhagen” Accepted at Big Windows; Two Pieces Out in ABZ #70

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Villa Copenhagen. Taken by me. Aug. 2024.

Editor Tom Zimmerman, of The Big Windows Review, has accepted my poem, “Swimming at Villa Copenhagen.” This is especially sweet because I submitted pieces to the predecessor of Big Windows, Blood Orange Review, and all were rejected. Can it be that I have learned something over the years? Anyway, the pieces I have read in Big Windows are impressive. I am flattered to be in such company. A big thank you to Editor Zimmerman.

This poem was not written in the Forever Workshop on surrealism and prose poetry, but it was written at the same time as the pieces I wrote for the workshop, so I credit it for getting my creative juices flowing. I also brought in Magritte in this poem, and that was due to his being on my mind from the workshop exercises. The picture above is from the front of the hotel, not the back where the pool is, but the windows are filled up in the same surreal way I saw in the ones around the pool, so the image is connected with the imagery in my poem.

The poem is about being temporarily in an alternative world. This was only possible because of privilege, however, and is ultimately illusory. The contrast between the privilege represented by such “Frivoli” worlds (the hotel is right next to the Tivoli Gardens) and the necessity of dreaming alternative worlds in order to escape from but also envision alternatives to this one is the main theme of the poem.

MissLunaRose12, graphic created to demonstrate the 6 axes of the HEXACO personality test. 2 Nov. 2019. Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

In other news, my pieces, “Personality Test Question” and “Refuse I and II,” which I discussed here, are out in Alien Buddha Zine #70. You can get the zine in black & white here or in color here. I find these zines are always filled with various pieces that allow you to stretch your reading boundaries, or at least find something to your taste.

“After Magritte’s The Lovers” Up at Paper Dragon

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bianca.maggio. René Magritte, The Lovers. Uploaded 4 June 2017. Flickr. PD.

Just a quick post to say that Issue 8 of Paper Dragon is up, with my poem in it. The poem is also mentioned in the Letter from the Editors–they note that its version of horror “takes on intimacy and temporality.” Many thanks to Co-Editors in Chief Krista Beucler and Reagan Prior, whose pictures are currently up on Paper Dragon‘s home page. It is nice to know my work is appreciated by the young. 🙂

Please check out the issue. I have read the first story, and it was creepy and chilling and sad. I think your world will be rocked.