Mary Carroll-Hackett's Blog, page 61

Daily Prompt Love <3 Giving, and Balance

 

20 April 2017

“No one has ever become poor by giving.” -Anne Frank

Make art about the benefits of giving.

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21 April 2017

Lots of company above this morning for our walk.

Make art about maintaining balance, about regaining balance, about seeking balance.

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Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Vessels, Relentlessness, and Talk in the Night

17 April 2017

Vessel (n.)
c. 1300, “container,” from Old French vessel “container, receptacle, barrel; ship” (12c., Modern French vaisseau) from Late Latin vascellum “small vase or urn,” also “a ship,” alteration of Latin vasculum, diminutive of vas “vessel.” Sense of “ship, boat” is found in English from early 14c. “The association between hollow utensils and boats appears in all languages” [Weekley]. Meaning “canal or duct of the body” (especially for carrying blood) is attested from late 14c.

Make art about a vessel.

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18 April 2017

Make art about something relentless, about relentless emotion.

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19 April 2017

Awake until four in the morning last night, me and the deer, and a lone owl in the oak outside the window.

Make art about a conversations in the night, about how the night talks to you.

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Daily Prompt Love <3 Some People Just Need to Fight

16 April 2017

“He fought because he actually felt safer fighting than running.”

– Richard Adams

It’s hard to empathize with the combative life attitude until we look below the surface and see it’s a protective mechanism, meant to combat the anxiety produced from a world perceived as hostile. The need to fight is really just a signal of deep fear. 

Make art about the fear driving combative people, or about understanding and forgiving them. 

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Happy National Poetry Month <3 What is Broken Is What God Blesses, Jimmy Santiago Baca

 

What is Broken Is What God Blesses




Jimmy Santiago Baca







The lover’s footprint in the sand
the ten-year-old kid’s bare feet
in the mud picking chili for rich growers,
not those seeking cultural or ethnic roots,
but those whose roots
have been exposed, hacked, dug up and burned
and in those roots
do animals burrow for warmth;
what is broken is blessed,
not the knowledge and empty-shelled wisdom
paraphrased from textbooks,
not the mimicking nor plaques of distinction
nor the ribbons and medals
but after the privileged carriage has passed
the breeze blows traces of wheel ruts away
and on the dust will again be the people’s broken
footprints.
What is broken God blesses,
not the perfectly brick-on-brick prison
but the shattered wall
that announces freedom to the world,
proclaims the irascible spirit of the human
rebelling against lies, against betrayal,
against taking what is not deserved;
the human complaint is what God blesses,
our impoverished dirt roads filled with cripples,
what is broken is baptized,
the irreverent disbeliever,
the addict’s arm seamed with needle marks
is a thread line of a blanket
frayed and bare from keeping the man warm.
We are all broken ornaments,
glinting in our worn-out work gloves,
foreclosed homes, ruined marriages,
from which shimmer our lives in their deepest truths,
blood from the wound,
broken ornaments—
when we lost our perfection and honored our imperfect sentiments, we were
blessed.
Broken are the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks where gangs duel to death,
yet through the wretchedness a woman of sixty comes riding her rusty bicycle,
we embrace
we bury in our hearts,
broken ornaments, accused, hunted, finding solace and refuge
we work, we worry, we love
but always with compassion
reflecting our blessings—
in our brokenness
thrives life, thrives light, thrives
the essence of our strength,
each of us a warm fragment,
broken off from the greater
ornament of the unseen,
then rejoined as dust,
to all this is.


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Happy National Poetry Month! What’s Broken, Dorianne Laux

What’s Broken


Dorianne Laux





The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago

my mother’s necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken

the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s

pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.

Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath,
the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken

little finger on my right hand at birth—
I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t

been rent, divided, split? Broken
the days into nights, the night sky

into stars, the stars into patterns
I make up as I trace them

with a broken-off blade
of grass. Possible, unthinkable,

the cricket’s tiny back as I lie
on the lawn in the dark, my heart

a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.


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Daily Prompt Love <3 Being Seen

15 April 2017

At some point every semester, I challenge my students to look everyone they meet in the eye, even the strangers they pass, to turn while standing in line and speak to the person behind them, in front of them, to make acknowledging other human beings around them a habit.

One of my current students asked me, sadness softening her young face, why other people won’t, don’t, look at each other, much less look each other in the eyes as they pass. We’re afraid, I told her, of revealing ourselves, of being seen. 

Make art about seeing each other, about taking the risk of being seen. 

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Friday Call for Submissions Love <3 500 Miles, New Publication Seeking Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry

500 Miles Magazine Seeking Submissions for Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry

500 Miles Magazine is a new publication for writers who create work a little outside the mainstream. We enjoy the funny, the experimental, and the generally well written. They are currently seeking submissions in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Rolling submission process.

No bio or cover-letter is required.

Submissions are free.

Please copy and paste your work into the body of your email to: :500milesmagazineATgmailDOTcom.

If your submission is accepted, they’ll ask for your bio.

 Website
Submission Guidelines

Happy National Poetry Month! The Meaning of the Shovel, Martin Espada

The Meaning of the Shovel
BY MARTÍN ESPADA


—Barrio René Cisneros

Managua, Nicaragua, June-July 1982






This was the dictator’s land
before the revolution.
Now the dictator is exiled to necropolis,
his army brooding in camps on the border,
and the congregation of the landless
stipples the earth with a thousand shacks,
every weatherbeaten carpenter
planting a fistful of nails.

Here I dig latrines. I dig because last week
I saw a funeral in the streets of Managua,
the coffin swaddled in a red and black flag,
hoisted by a procession so silent
that even their feet seemed
to leave no sound on the gravel.
He was eighteen, with the border patrol,
when a sharpshooter from the dictator’s army
took aim at the back of his head.

I dig because yesterday
I saw four walls of photographs:
the faces of volunteers
in high school uniforms
who taught campesinos to read,
bringing an alphabet
sandwiched in notebooks
to places where the mist never rises
from the trees. All dead,
by malaria or the greedy river
or the dictator’s army
swarming the illiterate villages
like a sky full of corn-plundering birds.

I dig because today, in this barrio
without plumbing, I saw a woman
wearing a yellow dress
climb into a barrel of water
to wash herself and the dress
at the same time,
her cupped hands spilling.

I dig because today I stopped digging
to drink an orange soda. In a country
with no glass, the boy kept the treasured bottle
and poured the liquid into a plastic bag
full of ice, then poked a hole with a straw.

I dig because today my shovel
struck a clay bowl centuries old,
the art of ancient fingers
moist with this same earth,
perfect but for one crack in the lip.

I dig because I have hauled garbage
and pumped gas and cut paper
and sold encyclopedias door to door.
I dig, digging until the passport
in my back pocket saturates with dirt,
because here I work for nothing
and for everything.




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Check out Martin Espada’s website for more beautiful poems! http://www.martinespada.net/

Daily Prompt Love <3 What You Give

14 April 2017

Make art about service, about how the self is found in service to others. 

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HeartWood Litmag Issue 3 Now Live!

HeartWood Issue 3 Now Live!

So honored to share work from CL Bledsoe,. J. P. Dancing Bear, Darnell Arnoult, Caroline Malone, Kiyah Moore , Sarah Robinson, Austin Jr., Katlin Brock, Amber Tran, Karla Van Vliet, Kayla Pearce, Susan Moorhead, Meaghan Quinn, Susan Moorhead, Nan Macmillan, Jeremy Reed, Brian Koester, LeighAnna Schesser, Adam McGraw, and Janice Hornburg