Phyllis Cole-Dai's Blog

Ready for a real trip?

  Thanks for being here! But I’ve packed my bags and moved all my writing to The Raft, my online community. Care to join me there?  

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You Can Do This

“I don’t think I can do this,” I told my friend Mary.* The two of us were meeting on Zoom to discuss a collaborative project. Before digging into business, we were checking in with each...

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Again

Perhaps like you, I’ve been preoccupied this week with the terrible events in Israel-Gaza. Please accept this new poem as a gesture of shared grief and, yes, despite everything, shared hope. Always hope. Like a...

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The Title of This Poem Has Been Censored

This past Monday, I participated in a public protest against efforts by a local group to ban more than 200 “inappropriate” books from the libraries in our school district. (Think Native Son by Richard Wright. Beloved by Toni Morrison. To...

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Practically a Tradition

This past Monday, our family loaded the trappings of college dorm life into our two cars. It was time to move Nathan back to campus for his junior year. As we prepared to leave home,...

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The ABCs of My Creative Life

What follows isn’t a poem. It’s a playful inventory of basic intentions that guide my creative work—indeed, my daily living. It sets forth how I aspire to conduct myself as a “maker” and as a...

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Blessed Are the Weird

This graphic is on one of my favorite t-shirts. A friend gave me the shirt years ago. I’m gonna wear it till it turns into a holey rag. That’s how much I love its message....

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The Sister of Mercy with Advanced Alzheimer’s Speaks of Prayer

What follows is a “found poem.” To create it, I took lines from a story I’d read this week on Braided Way and rearranged them into a poem, leaving the words mostly verbatim. I want to thank...

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Legs

In 1982, for a college trimester, I studied and did “service work” in the newly independent nation of Belize. Looking back, I don’t think the Belizeans much desired or needed my “service,” but the experience...

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Prayer

This is a very brief poem that I wrote in anticipation of “Poems, Prayers, & Promises,” our upcoming month-long Deep Dive. (You can still sign up!) What image might you use to describe your own experience...

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