writing about reading – Kathy Boles-Turner

A Week of Reading Binges & Good Customer Service

Yesterday I met a man who by way of introduction told me he was born in 1938 and his first job paid fifty cents per day. In customer service this sort of thing happens frequently. Some folks just want to stir up conversation, state their opinion or ask someone else’s to measure the contrast. Sometimes […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Fox and Furnace, by William Wright

1. Tonight so clear the Milky Way shimmers like a stoked furnace, the scattered stars like rogue embers deep in a bloomery. I recall my father’s face, the orange light of the wood stove imprisoned in his skin, his eyes trapping the firelight until he’d lobbed and poked the pine logs, then shut and latched […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Proof of Poetry, by Tom Sleigh

I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter and in my twenties I almost ended up there— and then as an alternative to vodka, to live alone like a hermit philosopher and court the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway— and then there were the years […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Empty House, by James Kimbrell

Every few nights I walk over here, screen door opened And springless, leaves now up to the second step, No one watching out the window but me with my elbows On the ledge, my face staring back at my staring in. What if, all along, I’d been waiting in there? What if The bird left […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Be Nobody’s Darling, by Alice Walker

Be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast. Take the contradictions Of your life And wrap around You like a shawl, To parry stones To keep you warm. Watch the people succumb To madness With ample cheer; Let them look askance at you And you askance reply. Be an outcast; Be pleased to walk alone (Uncool) Or […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: This Rain, by Jenna Butler

This Rain brings with it the scent of rain-soaked lilac, lemon lily. Bruised skirts of thunderclouds drop their wet hems over this prairie. It rains and the ditches brim, rains and the water rises like ire amongst the willows. What we say and do not say. The heart incandescent, riverine with distance. *** lilt […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: synesthesia after anesthesia, by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

waking up like a needle in a haystack afraid to be found and if found to make nothing more than a stitch in water but even so the unimaginable ripple might touch the tongue of a passing deer who has bent to drink so long and so deeply I forget my fear and become the […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Maggie Says There’s No Such Thing As Winter, by Janet McNally

If you believe in snow, you have to believe in water as it’s meant to be, loosed from clouds arranged like asphodel. Because that’s what it’s like to come back: a slow surfacing, memory spiraling away. You can sleep so long, whole seasons are forgotten like a hospital-room plaster, spidered with cracks in Portugal shapes. […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD:Sonnet XXVIII, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee tonight. This said—he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch […]

by Kathy Boles-Turner

APAD: Courbet, by Debra Allbery

Saturday afternoon in the two-hearted woods. Clouded brow of the upper midwest, sepia season stalled again at February. Out my window, scrim of hardwoods, a dark choke of pine. I’m in a lamplit corner, reading a book on Courbet. Then a memory like opening to a random page—a café back east, early, a window table. […]