LISTEN to “Rewind” Deborah’s 911 Poem

Listen to Deborah’s poem “Rewind” on Words To Go, (23 minutes, 19 seconds into the Podcast. “Rewind” was first published in Solstice Magazine online, then in New Millennium Review where it was a contest finalist.

DEBORAH’S NEW POETRY BK is HERE!

Take a peek at the Publisher’s link: Word Press: Fine Literary Publishing or Purchase at Amazon.com: Original Human DeNicola: Books

This is lush and generous book, a stirring of myth and childhood always coming home to the flesh.  A Gnostic Mary and a young girl on a swing are at home in the same dream space.  Deborah DeNicola has written her richest book, and one to get delightfully lost in.   —Doug Anderson

If Love Suffers Gladly

My left eye on the bougainvillea stinging with tanning lotion. The wind stolen like a kiss. And as birds entrain overhead only my solitude increases. I felt you through closed eyes, rubbing where sun block dripped, a searing pain like a blender blade whirring fish into soup. Tropical colors like week-old bruises. If love suffers gladly, I am happy to know even here, teetering over the other hemisphere, you are with me, airbound as spirit—And my own sighs are oceans with rip tides and the lapping of weeping. It is always such with women in mid-life. And most of the men—eons married—are so much more dear now, all of us weathered but wiser. Although I am almost exclusive, what’s left of this life includes you.

Santa Barbara Poetry Contest Winner

Deborah DeNicola’s poem “I Am, I Will” was the winner of the contest

and Deborah will be attending the Santa Barbara Poetry Conference  Aug 1-3rd.

I AM,  I WILL    

No pastries for breakfast, just a pear in my pocket and a long walk

on the beach at 6 a.m., wearing my bullet-proof bra and grey

duster as in an old film noir.  Now the sun

lifts quickly from its bed of waves, like the pink

rubber handball from junior high school, compact

disc ejected from the horizon. The sea is muted,

understated in steady breakers.  I Am, I Will,

says the sun and Let it be. And I do

not think of you as I watch gulls cross the sun

in formation like planes at the air show. And I think of how it took guts

to play handball with the guys when I was twelve.  I think Top Gun—

and how these birds are perfectly aligned. Then when the lead

flaps his wings, his side-kick pulses till they’re all in synch

and cease their flutter at the same time to dive

through the reddened edges of sun which begin to yellow

as if another sun lay behind them.  The few clouds are doused

in raiment.  And the disc burns, unconsumed, like Moses’ bush

while some god turns and awakens from sleep,

so the light deepens.  I stare, then stare at after-images

everywhere, the unconscious issue of  the sun assualting

both sand and sky, how it abides as whole civilizations are lost

and gone.  I think of Shelley’s Ozymandias,

how even things meant for endurance

crumble and die.  And I think of the Buddha

and his one revelation, everything changes.

I do not think of us as a lone surfer jogs by, his board

so much lighter than a cross beneath his buffed arm,

his wetsuit zipped up snug

so within his rubber skin, the bone-chilling water

will warm and will keep him

warm.

Read and Hear “Dusk”

See and hear Deborah’s poem “Dusk” in the February, 2009 issue of The Cortland Review.

“The Bacchanalia of Trash” is Best of the Net!

Deborah’s poem “The Bacchanalia of Trash” was chosen by Dorianne Laux for the “Best of the Net 2008” anthology.

“The Bacchanalia of Trash”

after A.R. Ammons

(Garbage)…is spiritual

Let’s worship the evolving cycles, the sweet and sour sediment scraped
from microwaveable take-out containers and tied into synch-sacs
with the morbid humors of our secret habits as well as inorganic
returnables, tuna-tins sharp enough to slit a vein, with an after-life
of their own via the ravaged curbside bin— Let’s praise organic husks,
the hides of grapefruit to whom we entrust the waking enzymes of our bodies
every morning. Grapefruit breaks down something, works out wherever
it goes and beats the beejesus out of fat. I break down the Sunday classifieds
into dispensable paragraphs for the recyclable brown bag, the Arts Section
I won’t give up to the trucks for a week or two after each new movie opens
and oh the scam of paper, the deadly sin of our worst addiction. At night
we hear junk mail grieving in the trees of our dreams.
This detritus all afternoon, this American frenzy for cleaning
as the sun shifts direction through burnished motes dancing
and the air wafts new odors, more expendable for being burnt
on manufactured woodchips, combustible faux-realite
as if our fantasies weren’t hot enough now that the season of barbecue
closes– We live in the city. We have no compost pile to turn and toss
with a fork like a nice salad of vermiculite and dirt. At least we no longer
heave our ashtrays out the fire-escapes at the moon. We’ve quit smoking;
We’re utterly clean and yet we dream that garbage shoves back up
through the kitchen sink, the pipes collapse and the Age of Aquarius
is without drinking water. Lord, must we fall to our knees and pray
to the Alchemists of Garbage for a new infra-structure to renew ourselves
this late in the century? Kleenex, Tampax, hairspray, the whitened stems
of asparagus, used dental floss, pulp and pitted masses, we need some
homeopathic jacketto clothe the mercurial state of the soul, some crushed
dandelion oil, funereal bouquet made to remedy the fresh droppings in the park;
the world of the dump where the Lapis Lazuli is stuffed between mayo
and crumpled foil at the bottom of the Oatios box, or stale salami
slid into a baggy like a commercial for safe sex . . . Freud himself felt
civilization reduced (or perhaps elevated) to Sex and Death and the ancients
grew the Goddess of Love from an abusive Father’s genitalia, polluting
a whole ocean—it all comes out in the wash—so why not Garbage
as the ultimate cure of itself, a huge festival every Spring,
The Bacchanalia of Trash, with mites and maggots and mating toadstools,
thread-bare shoes, violins and broomsticks, one big black Mass
for the crack-smoked gasses loose in the universe, a sacrifice for landfill
and the world made pure, made poetry, made pre-lapsarian enfin!

-Deborah DeNicola (Apple Valley Review)