HONK IF YOU LOVE THE LORD

John 3:16 is gaining on me, book,
chapter & verse welded to the bumper
of the Peterbilt burning diesel like
the devil in my rear-view mirror,
this son of a trucker come to set
driver against driver on I-85 near
Greenville, South Carolina, home
of Shoeless Joe and Praise Radio
whose listeners are the lambs of Christ,
say it ain’t so, in a world so loved
by God he gave his only begotten
as I give it more gas because Johnny
3:16 is barreling down, rolling steel
and chrome to kingdom come as if
my car is marked I Brake for Satan,
both of us overtaken by the white
Continental, license GOSPEL DJ,
a speeding preacher singing the news
whosoever followeth him shall not
perish, but shall take the off-ramp
for the Word of God Factory Outlet
where bibles stack halfway to heaven
next to Big Zack’s Discount Fireworks
and the roadside stand that promises
salvation from the traffic and an end
to everlasting thirst and hunger, yes
Hot Boiled Peanuts, Cold Peach Cider!

–from Rattle #23, Summer 2005
Tribute to Lawyer Poets

EXCRUCIATA

You want to look away
from where they lie—
sliced by glass,
battered by flung logs—
children carried from the sea.
You don’t want to be skinned like this,
your wide eyes peeled more open
than they’ve ever been.
But see them.
Small lost princes, heads thrown back
and arms spread so rigidly, the crucified;
see the dark fringe of their beautiful lashes
on these impassive cheeks, no warmer
than the waves that toss them back
to the arms of mothers, fathers
inside out with grief.
See how loss eviscerates.
All night, again, you wander
along the iron gateways, among the purchased
aromas of lust, looking for a certain house
in a strange city. It all has washed away.
Softly, gently the night
opens and closes his wings,
eating and begetting, until the windows
disclose enough dawn
to wake you.

–from Rattle #23, Summer 2005
Tribute to Lawyer Poets

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

I’ve seen them sitting in corridors
on locked units of psych hospitals
where it takes a nurse and two buzzers
to get you in and then back out again.
I’ve walked by them parked in chairs
in hallways—old women sitting alone,
uncombed, unkempt, needing a shave,
talking to someone the rest of us can’t see.

This one I know from sitting next to her in court
last week. I know from reading records
how the people that she knew started getting fuzzy
and fading away along with her mind.
Contacts lost over the years—
one son in prison, the other died a drunk,
a daughter somewhere
maybe in a facility.

She was young once, this woman—
had lovers and babies and friends.
All gone. Except the memories
of the people with whom she still
has unfinished business, to whom she is
explaining slowly, methodically, like an old
argument many times rehearsed, again
what is so important that she tell them.

–from Rattle #23, Summer 2005
Tribute to Lawyer Poets

THE STREET OF THE CELLIST
for Dan

When at last
you find the street of the cellist,
may the dread
that accompanied you
fall by the way,
may the yellow hive
of her window direct you
to the garden
where the russet tint
of alders keep
for all time her three
stone sundials in their shade.
Don’t worry
if the thumbprint
of oil placed
on your forehead trembles
at the pallor of her hair,
in the layered
softness of snow falling
on your shoulders,
in the hum of zero
sounding your arrival,
listen for notes
drawn slow from the tattered
libretto of your life.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Tribute to Nurses

UTOPIA MINUS
by Susan Briante

Ahsahta Press
1910 University Drive
Boise, ID 83725
ISBN 978-1934103197
2011, 83 pp., $17.50
ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu.

Utopia Minus, the second collection of poetry from Susan Briante, takes as its inspiration the throwaway landscape of postmodern America: a boarded up Sunglass Hut, a cell-phone mast, gas station canopy. Briante, coolly observant and dissatisfied, searches for something of the eternal and metaphysical in public restroom scrawl and roadside vegetation.

And the potential for deeply affecting verse is palpable. These poems dare to ask why humans feel empty in the comfort of development, and how to live with the knowledge that development must decay. It is an ambitious and commendable inquiry, but Briante never finds an appropriate balance between sincerity and snark (“O Sunglass Hut, we hardly knew you!”) to give her imagery the strength to work as social comment. The collection’s strongest poems are deeply nostalgic, but the reader is never sure of what. “There are no great cities left in America,” she writes in “Mid-State.” But for which great American cities of the past are we to yearn? She writes about General Sherman’s army raining fire and death in Georgia, and the horticultural finery of Robert E. Lee’s plantation house with some wistfulness. American Indians and Jamestown colonists give way to strip malls and strip clubs, but none of it comes to signify much more than a lazy afternoon rainstorm in the Metroplex. In “Short Lines,” Briante writes that “All the great metaphors have been taken,” and the reader is inclined to think she believes it.

The book, a physically gorgeous paperback from Ahsahta Press, is divided into three numbered sections separated by six open letters, written in margin-justified prose, to such figures as the Surgeon General and the President of the United States. In her memo to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, she recalls that “Lifting Farid’s face from my hair to watch him come this morning was the best of the day.” Farid is her husband, and a poet himself. “Farid and I have $15,000 in savings, $40,000 in debt”; inconsequential personal details like these undermine the collection’s purpose, and distract from the struggle for universal meaning that the poems chronicle.

It would be a mistake to discount Briante’s sharp eye for the image. Some lines in the collection are nothing short of astounding. She assures the reader in “I-35” that “A Georgia moon can strip color from the sky, turn a whole landscape into its still-wet negative,” a succulent image for its being so textured and visual. “In the hard soil of childhood, God was everywhere: in pitted sycamores, a vibrating clothes line, in fireflies hung still as lanterns from a Japanese maple”; when she conjures images as salient as these, there can be no question that Briante is a poet of real invention and inspiration. It would seem that Utopia Minus suffers not from a lack of zeal on the part of the poet, but from its over-ambition.

These poems, at their best, have moments of genuine resonance. At times, the beautiful imagery confronts the reader and asks what is gone wrong with the soul of America, why “We are trying to read a dirty world in structures of kinship, in gutted water heaters, in hills of plastic garbage bags.” But Briante can’t have it both ways: either the crumbling infrastructure and listless, quiet tragedies of postmodern society matter in the same way as the mythic history she exalts, or the cataloging of suburban minutia and its various boredoms and anxieties is mere self-absorption–with less poetic meaning and purpose than graffiti on an overpass.

____________

Nate Friedman is an MFA candidate at McNeese State University, and his poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review and storySouth.

WARD 24
St. Patrick’s Day, 1966

Mental hospitals and snake pits, synonymous,
when I began my career. Stairwells smelled
of Lysol. Patients lay on the dew covered
lawns, their dormitory bedrooms padlocked
all day long to prevent napping. Eight-hundred
milligrams of Thorazine made walking feel
like trudging through deep mud.

Women slept coiled on communal bathroom
floors, guarding handbags, pictures of children,
a fork for a weapon. Hems of hospital-housedresses,
fabric worn thinner than tissues, wiped away
the few tears that managed to escape
this overmedicated state.

Come to my group, my plea, as I knelt offering
filtered cigarettes as free admission tickets.
In empty silence, we sat on single beds, arranged
in a square, in a room as cavernous as an airplane hanger.
What was my hurry, most had lived there twenty years?
Hardly a word dropped into the atmosphere

until St. Patrick’s Day, when I presented
a single green carnation to each woman in the group.
Anna sniffed the blossom; Edna placed it between
her breasts. Rose wore hers over her ear.
Vivian shared a memory about the feel of seeds
in her hands when she gardened. The oldest patient,
Lillian, who had a lobotomy watered
the blossom with her drool.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Tribute to Nurses

WHAT MY PARENTS WANT

At 86 Dad wants a new silver Mercury with heated seats.
Mom wants whatever Dad wants. We’re on the phone,
and I’m scrubbing the kitchen floor with my headset
on, scratching at the black sap marks that stick and
spread before finally letting go. We’re all tired of talking.
So I don’t ask them about moving closer to their kids;
I don’t mention the nurse they fired; I don’t say I think
they’re making a mistake. I breathe hard and tackle
a tough wad of sap. They tell me how cold it is in Las Vegas
in the winter; how the mountains turn purple in their rise
toward the sky. I don’t ask them if they’re eating. I keep
myself from mentioning their many medications. They
want me to love them; they want me to leave them alone.
They want to fumble along the walls of their stucco
house until one falls down, cheek to the cool tile
of the floor, bones so heavy, joints stiff, life blood
thick and unwilling. I hope the other one will lie down too,
pull an afghan over them, the one with squares her mother
made. I hope in the accumulating heat of the desert
they will gasp into each other’s arms and give themselves
away. I hope they can do it without breaking. I hope
they can do it in the clean sweet heat of the day, an open
mouthed entry, the last ripe fruits of breath released.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

WHEN THE POET HAPPENS TO BE A NURSE

At social functions, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I answer that I’m a nurse, and that I also write poetry. As a rule, the conversation then turns down the path I’ve taken as poet. Few people ask about the nursing (unless of course they happen to be nurses too). Few are curious about the connection between nursing and poetry.

Perhaps because of the order in which I name the two paths—nursing, followed by an “also”—people tend to draw the romantic conclusion that at some point in my nursing career I felt the call to be creative, and thus I write in my spare time for the sake of my poetic soul. Perhaps it is I who have led them to that conclusion, for I’m given to remarking wryly that no one really makes a living writing poems, but one can at least pay the bills by working as a nurse. No wonder then that I’m perceived as a nurse who happens to write poems. But in truth I’m a poet who happens to be a nurse. (I also write fiction, but then that’s another story, no pun intended.)

I suppose it could be said that a nurse who writes serious poetry is not unlike anyone else who writes serious poetry while also holding down a job outside the halls of academia. (Academia being the only place where a regular, working poet might be able to make living as poet.) Dana Gioia devotes a chapter of Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture to a discussion of American poets who happen to have made a living in business, ultimately making the case that these poets did not “simplify themselves into the conventional image of poet.” Gioia points out that he chose this particular group—poets who have at one time or another in their lives worked as insurance salesmen or bankers or investment brokers—because it serves the purposes of his wider argument as “one of the more extreme and paradoxical examples of the alienated modern artist.”

Is the poet who works in a hospital, tending to the sick, any different from the poet who works in an office building selling insurance? Maybe not, since both these poets work at “regular” jobs for a paycheck in order to work in the off hours towards the same goal—a well-crafted poem. But to me the more interesting question is this: All things being equal (that is, we’re talking about serious poetry that merits the consideration of both the literary critic and the lover of poetry) what is it about the body of work written by nurses—as a distinct group—that is worth our attention?

Gioia poses the same question about businessman-poets (all the poets he discusses in that particular chapter are men)—“Is anything even gained by segregating them as a distinct group of writers and comparing them to other poets whose lives seem more typical?” Obviously, given the depth of his own thinking on the subject, Gioia has concluded that there is indeed something to be gained. I agree, if only for the pleasure of digging past the intriguing question and into the poetry itself. But then Gioia goes off on in other directions (money and wealth as ancient subjects, for example) that may not be as useful to this discussion.

One of Gioia’s questions, however, went off in such a direction as to give me pause: “Why did these men write nothing about their working lives?” Clearly, one would never ask that question about the “distinct group of writers” who are nurses, for the obvious reason that when nurses write poems, they quite often are writing about their working lives, with all the poetic energy it takes to address what they know firsthand of illness, birth, dying and death, suffering and healing. One could argue that a great many poems in the English and American tradition address these very same subjects. Still, there is no denying that the majority of poems written by nurses—at least those specifically identified and anthologized as such—are uniquely set in the working life of the nurse, a working life that requires an intimacy with human suffering the likes of which no other profession requires. Poems written by nurses are more likely to be narrative, to appeal to the senses, to be attentive to the human body in ways that are knowing, and authoritative. It seems to me this is only natural, given the sort of experience a nurse naturally draws from.

I dare say that most of the poets represented in what Cortney Davis calls a “small revolution in nurses’ writing” did not take offense when Davis and her co-editor Judy Schaefer (both of them nurses, both poets) gathered them together under one title—Nurses—and published their poems in an anthology. (There are now two such anthologies.) The members of that small revolution owe a dept of gratitude for the passionate efforts of these anthologists, and for the outreach of editors like Danielle Ofri of Bellevue Literary Review. Were it not for the distinct grouping—for the category of “literary nurse”—some of these poets might never have received the notice they are due.

That said, I am still a poet who happens to be a nurse. The distinction is important to me because I resist the suggestion that any subject matter—in my case, the working life of a nurse—is of primary importance in recommending a body of work to a reader. Some poets are nurses, and others are insurance salesmen and, yes, a lot of them are academics, but regardless of how they make a living, the best of these strive to perfect their art. Confined by the topics relating to a particular profession, how can any poet grow as an artist?

In her foreword to Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses, Joanne Trautmann Banks writes that she’d like to remove the hyphen from the term “nurse-writers.” She concludes with an imperative: “Call them simply writers who happen to have unusual access to us.” (xiv) I think Banks has it right. In reading the poems in this tribute issue, it is worth considering the import of that “unusual access.”

By virtue of the profession, nurses have physical access to us: They are present at moments of human vulnerability. At the same time, the work that nurses do—often so close to our pain as to breathe the very air of it—demands a discipline that limits access to emotion. Good nurses keep a check on the feelings—fear, revulsion, anger, grief—that might compromise what they have to offer as professionals. Even at the joyful occasions, childbirth for example, nurses know they aren’t entirely free to indulge in emotion. On the one hand they must be empathetic and engaged, but on the other hand they must be removed and clear-headed. Thus, at the end of the workday, a nurse’s approach to writing a poem isn’t exactly like Wordsworth’s emotion recollected in tranquility. The nurse’s approach might be described as professional barriers to emotion dismantled out of poetic necessity. My phrasing isn’t as euphonious as Wordsworth’s, but it’s the best I can do, and I believe it’s true.

This is not to say that nurses write poems to let off the steam of pent-up feeling. It is to say that their approach to poems (even those poems addressing subjects outside the nursing workday—sea turtles and street cellists and the Day of the Dead, for example) is by way of a privileged and precarious access to human experience. Rather than merely reporting from the bedside, rather than aiming for sensation or sentiment, good poets who happen to be nurses work hard at the craft. As a distinct group, it is true they have an unusual access to us. But it’s important to note that this access is not easy, and that each poet in the distinct group presented here has approached it deliberately. Each one has mustered up the discipline it takes to make something beautiful out of what a nurse knows.

Works cited:

Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf, 1992).

Davis, Cortney and Judy Schaefer. Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses (University of Iowa Press, 1995).

Davis, Cortney and Judy Schaefer. Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses (University of Iowa Press, 2003).

__________

Madeleine Mysko is a registered nurse and a graduate of The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University. Her poems and prose have appeared in such venues as The Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Bellevue Literary Review, The Baltimore Sun and American Journal of Nursing. Her first novel, Bringing Vincent Home (Plain View Press) is based on her experiences as an Army nurse on the burn ward during the Vietnam War. A poetry collection, Crucial Blue (Rager Media), is due for release in 2008.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

ASSASSIN

All day we mock what
is beyond our touch
and at the end of the day
I drive thirty miles home
to sleep with a man
who doesn’t deserve
to live his life like a slave.
My children slake their own
thirsts hours away and I
watch videos of their childhood.
Outside, the pansies I have
yet to plant wither in October sun.
I am an American woman,
spoiled as last month’s gravy,
ripe as ground pork in a dumpster,
tethered by plenty,
undone by complacency
vivid as a severed hand.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

TALKING WITH STANLEY KUNITZ
by Juanita Torrence-Thompson

Torderwarz Publishing Company
P.O. Box 671058
Flushing, New York 11367-1058
ISBN 978-0-9652892-3-8
2012, 78 pp. $14.95
www.PoetryTown.com

In Juanita Torrence-Thompson’s latest book, Talking with Stanley Kunitz, her title poem describes a woman who attends a poetry reading, then has a serendipitous experience–an extended private conversation with Kunitz, the great poet. The poem, written with profound simplicity, ends with these lines:

She filled her mind with
Diamonds.
Every syllable glistened.

This same summary is appropriate for Torrence-Thompson’s book, for the title poem opens the door on a panorama of eclectic poetry, and indeed, every syllable glistens.

The book is divided into four groups of poems: “Talking with Stanley Kunitz”–30 poems, “Ellington Concertos in the Key of Vermont”–17 poems, Traveling on the Road with Dr. Martin Luther King”–10 poems, and “Driving Robert De Niro–Sestinas”–9 poems.

The 66 poems in this volume take the reader on a roller coaster ride of human experience and emotion—from the anticipatory climb toward exhilarating heights of love, of both nature and fellow humans–agape, eros, phileo, and storge (family love)–to breath-taking plunges into disappointment, sorrow, and loss (tsunamis, trapped miners, the death of Martin Luther King), to a plethora of exciting, unexpected curves into reflection, irony, mystery, and triumph, and frequent quick surprising dives into humor. This book will leave you breathless and wanting to ride again.

I enjoyed every poem in this book, but I had favorites in each section. In the first section, in a poem titled “Teenager in London’s West End,” there’s an incident about a teenager who by chance meets Orson Welles walking on the street with a beautiful young woman. She works up courage to ask for his autograph. He agrees to give it, but she can’t find a pen in her purse—

I quickly scrambled for a pen. That is, I tugged
and prodded, glancing frantically at Orson Welles
waiting patiently, while this starstruck slip of an
American girl looked for a pen, a pencil or even
an eyebrow pencil. Exasperated, I finally said,
“Do you have a pen, Mr. Welles?”
“No,” he said. Then he took the young woman’s hand
and walked away, while I stood there in Trafalgar Square
starstruck and dumbstruck in the velvet London night.

This writer has the ability to take you with her into situations and experiences with words and phrases that draw the reader into the moment. I love the comment “or even an eyebrow pencil.” With that small phrase, the poet captures the desperation and frustration of the moment. Haven’t we all been there? This poem struck my funny bone, yet it also left me feeling the disappointment the poet must have felt at this missed opportunity.

Fascinating titles like, “Under the Pomegranate Sky” have equally fascinating lines that leap playfully from the whimsical to the mundane, from “A wrinkled day/ With kitty-corner folds” to “Quaker Oats/ Boiling in the pot at sunrise” and “The canker in your mouth/ That wouldn’t go away/ Although you gargled and swished/ Until the 4th of July.”

Torrence-Thompson takes everyday experiences and magically turns them into special events. In her poem, “Turn Down the Sun,” readers meet Jeb Tompkins, who lives “Down the clay road/ Near Tompkin’s old barn” and who was “meaner than/ A fox on a trampoline,” and “Jeb’s new wife Laurel Lee” who was “Always putting on airs /Trying to be different/ From us plain folks.” The poem goes on to reveal the narrator as a nosy neighbor who uses a pair of binoculars to keep track of her interesting country neighbors. This curious spy concludes, “It’s none of my never mind./ I’d best get to the canning./ Can’t wait to hear the gossip/ Tonight at Johnson’s barn dance.”

In “Litany of a Wife,” Torrence-Thompson tells the poignant story of a trapped miner in the voice of an anguished wife who waits for her husband’s rescue. With her life “now surrounded/ by coal-black walls,” she thinks of all the ordinary things that become so precious when life is on the line. We hear agonized cries from her desolate heart as she waits for news of her husband. Like all who grieve, the woman focuses on small irrelevant details to keep from dealing with the enormity of the situation. While thinking how glad she is to have given him a good breakfast, she snaps to the fact that his breakfast is unimportant now when what he needs most is fresh air to breathe.

Lord, why am I thinking about food
when we have to worry about them
getting enough fresh air and hope
the explosion did not block his way
out of the labyrinth and that he was
not crushed in the black abyss.

In the first section were several poems about Little Neck Bay, and I found myself wanting to go there. The “bay” poems were among my favorites. It’s difficult to choose an excerpt; each stanza is exquisite and begs to be quoted. The third and fourth stanza from “Afternoon on Little Neck Bay” will give you a small taste of the bay poems:

I imagine myself charmed
by long-necked cormorant plying
the lapping waves at dawn. I’ll rest my head
upon the satin shore while silver moonbeams
inhabit my mind, and a nightingale perches
upon the black locust to lull me to sleep,

and I dream the bay and I
could stay here forever and ever
and ever.

The poem “Snowflake” proves that a poem does not have to be long to be effective. The stark simplicity of this poem is as perfect as the snowflake it describes, and although the tiny snowflake melts in the poem, it continues to hug my mind:

SNOWFLAKE

I watched a snowflake
fall and hug a wall
I blinked, and then
it wasn’t there at all

In a delightful poem “Cinnamon Day” I joined the poet sitting in an Italian restaurant, watching other patrons, and dreaming of exotic adventures until her food arrives. At the sight of the food, she is thrust into the immediate need of hunger, and her dreams melt like snow. Who among us has not experienced such as this? Our strong physical appetites in a temporal moment trump our long desired dreams and aspirations.

Italian bread was set
Upon a white linen tablecloth

…

She studied a painting
Of a young, blonde woman,
In a wide white hat
Legs crossed
Aboard ship with a collie

For 30 seconds she wished
She were the woman in the
Painting on an adventure
To the Taj Mahal
Ancient Acropolis
Or to the African tundra

Minestrone soup and
Hot antipasto arrived
Thrusting her into the moment
Melting her thoughts
Like snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro

In the second section of the book, “Ellington Concertos in the Key of Vermont,” the poem “Echoes from the Mountaintop” takes the poet back in time to a mountain hamlet, horse-drawn carriages, and her mother’s loving echo from the mountain peak. The poet lifts her hand into the air, almost touching the amber sky. I can feel with the poet the longing for less technology and impersonal efficiency and more warmth and personal attention. In this mountain hamlet the poet speaks of a general store on the town green where “Proprietor and clerks are pleasant/ and helpful while the town gentry/ hold doors open for tourists and writers/ making us feel welcome.”

This same longing for a simpler life and more peace and quiet pervades many of the poems in this section. In “Cracked Ceiling in a New England Country House”

A poet rhymes her verses
stacking them
with harsh metaphors
mocking the world
line after line

Nostalgia and enduring love clings to the stanzas of “Man and Woman in Vermont”:

They sit in the rose-colored
dining room…

coifed ivory hair
framing a weathered face
Hazel eyes engage
He smiles, leans forward for the salt
which he sprinkles on his broccoli…

A warmth emanates from them
like two cast iron stoves
plucking African violets on a scorching safari

In “Wind-Blown Thoughts” the poet “sits on a maple stump/ waiting for inspiration…She wonders why she is here/ Waiting for inspiration…Waiting to put cursive curliques/ On recycled paper.” She concludes it is “Time to speak out, be herself/ Time to show the world her mettle/ Time to write mellifluous thoughts/ Spilling onto parchment.” These “wind-blown thoughts” sum up the desire of poets and writers everywhere.

Near the end of the book among the sestinas, I found another poem about Little Neck Bay that I like best of all the bay poems. Although I’ve never been to Little Neck Bay, reading Torrence-Thompsons poems, especially “Falling in Love with Little Neck Bay” made me fall in love with it too. Here are a couple of stanzas from the sestina that took me there:

Blue, green, yellow bouquets
entice romantic love.
It is a honeymoon for my eyes
feasting on pristine Little Neck Bay
at high tide, when birds
take wing and prance on emerald shores.

Smoothly sculpted rocks pepper the shore.
Nature flings her bouquet
which spirals into the air, while birds
soar through teal blue skies with love,
tap dancing on Little Neck Bay
on a warm summer day. My eyes

scour the jade green landscape for other eyes
but I am alone on shore
watching boats ply the cerulean bay

Every poem in this volume is worthy of an individual critique, but space does not permit a full review of each individual jewel that fills this jewel box of a book. Besides if I shared every poem here, you would have no need to read the book, and you do need to read this book, and you will want to read it again and again. Juanita Torrence-Thompson lives up to her reputation as an important American poet.

___________

Valerie Martin Bailey is a poet and editor from San Antonio, Texas. She is the editor of three poetry anthologies: Inkwell Echoes, the San Antonio Poets Association anthology, The Dreamcatcher, the anthology for the Laurel Crown Foundation, and Encore, the anthology of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. She serves on the Executive Board of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies as 2nd Vice Chancellor. A Councilor for the Poetry Society of Texas, she has won their two highest awards: The President’s Award and the Hilton Ross Greer Outstanding Service Award. She has chaired two state poetry conferences and one national poetry conference. She has served as the guest poetry editor for the San Antonio Express-News and is an associate editor of Voices de la Luna: A Quarterly Poetry and Art Magazine published in San Antonio, Texas. She is in demand as a judge for state and national poetry contests and has judged for the state societies of: Texas, Arizona, Minnesota, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Utah, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and many others. She has been Poet Laureate of the San Antonio Poets Association eight times and has won their Poetic Excellence Award six times. She was recently one of twenty-one poets nominated in the city’s search for a Poet Laureate to represent the entire City of San Antonio.