When the Rooster Crows . . .

We moved the mother rabbit and her three baby bunnies to the outside enclosure. This space
has a hutch with a wide yard for them to eat grass and play a decent game of chase. Yesterday, I was doing dishes and spotted one of our roosters by the enclosure. Optical illusion: it looked like he had flown into the area, but the mother rabbit and babies were too calm. He was spying a pan
rabbit grits. He let out a crow,which sounds a bit like Elvis, and scared the liver out of the baby bunnies. They scattered every which way. They are the size of my hands and they look like little snowballs. The mother didn't even lift her head. Too busy eating grass. Ahh, no bother, they're okay.


In the mail: my issue of Tar River Poetry arrived on Saturday ( a little bit beat up by the USPS, which upsets me because I keep this journal. Wish they would mail it inside of a paper sleeve). Inside some of the best poems I've read in a very long time: Kathleen Flenniken, whose second collection Plume has just been released by University of Washington Press and she was a recent 2012 Pushcart Prize winner. I had the good fortune of meeting and getting to know Kathleen during my MFA days at PLU. So many wonderful things have happened to our graduates. Kathleen is now the Poet Laureate of Washington; Philip Memmer whose newest collection will be forthcoming this year:The Storehouses of the Snow: Psalms, Parables, and Dreams;Robert Cording, who I have been following for over 20 years; Billy Collins, Barbara Conrad and many more. This issue is so lovely. I'm so grateful to Tar River Poetry for supporting my work over these many years. I too have a poem in this issue. It's one of my poems that is part of a Neruda series or conversation with Neruda. Thus far, 13 poems have been published from this series. I have approximately 24 poems. I'm hoping it will be a chapbook. We'll see.

Other publishing news:

Since the New Year, I have had poems (mostly prose poems) accepted in the following journals:
Ann Arbor Review, scissors & spackle, The Indian River Review, Three Line Poetry, The Applicant, Granny Smith Magazine, Punchnel's, Curio Poetry, Bone Orchard Poetry(Ireland), and Blueline.