Black is … and a poem

Here is a poem from Black.  It was first published in Blue Hole in 2012.


The People Who Live Here

Some people want this desert land:
the low mesquite, yellowed grass,
cottonwood, yucca, prickly pear.
They live in the tin-roofed houses, trailers,
drive the tractors with dust
pouring up and around them,
wave at our train.
Some wait bitter for the school bus,
plan lives in faraway Tempe, Phoenix,
but beside them stand cousins
who gaze out over the rangeland
to hills dotted with juniper
and taste that long look.
These are people who want
the way cloud shadows move over the scrub.
They want the rain stinks
of mud and sagebrush and cows.
They do not mind the dusts
or the glitter in the air.
They stand beside the dry sand of the river
and feel something moving under it.

Black is out

December, 2013
I've taken delivery of my poetry collection, Black, from Virtual Artists Collective.  It will be available through this website (see the paypal button) or at independent bookstores (the vacpoetry.org site can direct you to these), Powell's, or Amazon.

The best for me is if you will order from this website or buy at a reading.


give me instructions on signing it

If you buy a copy of Black and you want it signed, you might say who to (yourself, someone else, you as a couple) and anything else I might need to know in signing it.  Aiming to please!
I believe the buy button works now.  Let me know if it doesn't.
whew!
I've been told the buy now button doesn't function.  I'm working on the problem right now (Sun 10:45 AM)
My book Black is coming out in a week.  I'm excited.  Thanks so much to Steven Schroeder and Virtual Artists Collective for putting it out.  And to Regina Schroeder for the great cover.  They did a lovely job.