What I'm up to recently

community

helping host the Just This Writing and Zen weekly online writing sessions (last 15 years)

& co-editing Just This (an online magazine of the Zen Arts) 

mutual critique of poetry and fiction through Oklahoma City online poetry group, Austin Poetry Study             Group, and Space City Critters (through Armadillocon)

marketing 

Rock and Friends  hybrid poetry and flash collection, about the elementals Rock, Jackrabbit, Turtle,                 Coyote and the Kid

The Amulet (with Sheila Simonson) (a coming of age historical fantasy set in pre-Christian Ireland, about             Conn, who is the likely heir to the clan's kingship but on the run from rivals who want to kill him)

revising

a Zen poetry collection

Promised Land, a portal world speculative novel of two brothers (one raised in the clans and the other             kidnapped by a religious extremist group) who reunite and must defend themselves against attack

recent readings or presentations

Scissortail Writing Festival, Southeastern Oklahoma University, April, 2025, reading from Rock and                 Friends and in 2023

Wayfinding talk, July, 2025 Appamada Zen Center

Panel reading, Flash, People's Literary Festival, Corpus Christi, Texas 2023

poems recently published (2023-2025)

in 

Just This (multiple poems, essays, photos)

Texas Poetry Assignment (poems, interview) 

The Marble Block (poem)

Animal Tales (poem)

Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Poetry: An International Anthology, ed. Jonas Zdanys. Lamar University Literary Press (3 poems)

Lone Star Poetry:Championing Texas Verse, Community, and Hunger Relief, eds. Laurence Musgrave and Milton Jordan. Kallisto Gaia Press (2 poems)

Ran

Kim Mosley

To "Ran" by Kim Mosley

It is not what we see
in the bright shapes of the day--
a crinkled gold of sunshine
on flowers and steps,
a pond we walk by catching the sky
a watered lawn the right green.

These are there, of course,
and true in their way,
as is the gray of concrete,
rainy morning duty 
where we rise with not enough sleep
and drink our coffee, shake our arms, 
our shoulders, to rouse ourselves.
Look at the sunshine creeping 
under the blinds, we say,
You can do this—get out there!

But behind all that—the sun catching 
rainbow on the drops from the sprinkler,
the paper we draw from our briefcases—
lies an ocean that sun and paper 
float in, a dark they rise out of, like islands.

An antelope runs the plain. 
It leaps the absence,
the gap,
the lightless fjords between the known.
Its body—not-body—is a black possibility,
a night that turns into the face of day

that turns into so many things—faces
and oranges and isthmuses, 
crowded onto our mainland of the real.

Beyond it float fragments and wires 
of the ungraspable,

an island of fog 
where the unnamed and the unnameable
rub against each other in the mist

and the broad water beyond it all, 
the deep below things and their names,
the black of everythingalltogether 
not yet born
ready to rise.

—Sarah Webb, 11/16/20

Kim's artwork and Sarah's poem published in Just This, December, 2020

Meteor

To Kim Mosley’s “Meteor” on the Eve of the Election

Ooh, coming right at us
the slam!

It
hurls us upside
down
and sideways
splashes a thousand
ponds
into the clouds

steams us
wrings us

topples
buildings to house-
shapes
under the sand
walls
the archaeologists can puzzle over—
why?

Oh, why not?
mutter lava
and melted coins

A tree stands here and a
segment of
brook

Maybe a mountain range
can make it through
a child
a deer
or two.

Sarah Webb 11-2-20

Teeth

To Kim Mosley's “Teeth” 

Lively, happy, the Earth. 

But, no, a screaming face 

a furry man with an extra arm sending out waves of energy

a gaping whale and a gaping ghost.

Near them, coming up and out, a camel 

a man-phoenix 

a slug, a horn, the numerals 2 2 7.

Reality in all its ways—real and unreal,

spinning into numbers and dunes

breakfast and the phantasmagoria of the mind.

Out of the movement of water 

a whole that lasts a moment or a day.

published Just This, October, 2020

—Sarah Webb

H.E.R.O.N.

Today I swam, silent, behind my daughter

through cool water, the wind a touch,

riding low waves, green and silver,

following the signs she is teaching me

in my new deafness:  H.e.r.o.n.  D.o.c.k.  Come.

 

Her head bobbed, a dark seal, past Jean's dock

and submerged rocks, out onto the open lake

and the rougher waters of the drowned river channel,

Tim's pier then and the neighbors' past, and there, See.

A gray shape under the silver Xs of the pipes,

stilt-legged, slow. The heron.

 

And my daughter tracking him.

She turned to point and I bobbed my fist to say, Yes.

Yes, I see him. Yes, I see you. You have led me to a good place.

 

She raised her camera in its pouch,

head and camera blending in the bright of the water.

He stepped along the shore, and she followed.

Brown against brown, I saw her take her shot,

shadow stepping into light, the jab for fish,

then, tall against blue and cloud, head lifted,

iconic bird of water and rock and sky.

 

Heron and girl fixed in my gaze.

I saw her glide to the bird through the silver, close,

so close she looked up to see him and I marveled he did not take flight.

And I took my own picture, having no instrument but my heart

to say, Look and remember: here is the one I have loved in this life

learning to see, learning to live. 

—Sarah Webb

—Heron by Amanda Webb

booth published Just This, September, 2020

Dancer

 

—Kim Mosley

Dancer

At the center a figure 

dances. Around him the 

bubble of the world spins.

Fragments float and fall,

reflections and objects:

gate, lightbulb, plant and bird.

A foot raises, a mouth gapes.

Cornets and lines of crops

moon launches and petroglyphs.

Dancing the world into being, dancing 

the end.  Continuous beginning 

out of continuous decay.

Exhausting, exhilarating, 

exhausting, creating order

out of a chaos of sticks and gravel.

Juggler, the man keeps the world 

in the air, will not let it crash

will not let it sling into chaos.

The mind tires, the body falters.

Who can keep a world alive,

keep a world from breaking?

What man can do it?

Dancers stumble and lose hold.

Their mouths go slack.

Turn then to the one inside the man 

who speaks from the dancer

through a hidden ordering

who shapes his dance

—Sarah Webb, 9/7/20

published September, 2020 Just This

When I Rise

 

When I rise in the morning

the world is dark.

I fall, seeing the darkness,

thinking dark is the day.

When light edges in timid

in mist in the east

I fall timid to meet the day.

I fall timid, reaching for this to do

thinking, oh no, avoid, refrain--

do and refrain, gain this, lose that.

I fall into dark before the day rises

fall into the small confine of my body

and the day not begun.

When I rise in the morning

the floor cold on my feet

water cold in my mouth

and my mind still caught in the cool of dream

and the day glimmers through the blinds,

I turn from the room where I cannot see,

to the day that is turning to morning

to a junco on the wire of the feeder

to steam from the kettle under the stove lamp

and I do not say, this is what to do

this what I expect, what I expect of you.

Then the day rises with me and around me

and the sun appears over the hill.

—Sarah Webb

Just This, August, 2020

Places to Read Poetry in Austin

I'm back in Texas from a year spent mostly in Oklahoma preparing a house for sale and two summers on the road.  Now the big question, how often to drive into Austin for its fabulous readings and open mics?  It's an hour and a half each way, driving back in the dark dodging the deer, but I want to be part of the community of poetry.

Sunday I attended a small open mic, Recycled Reads, on Burnet Road in Austin.  I'd never been there before, and it was fun to get to know Louise Gail Richardson and Ralph Hausser better.  Thom Woodruff I knew pretty well and having been keeping up with on Facebook, but it was great to see him again.  Excellent writing, small group, reading together around a table. This Sunday was narrative writing (though we really could read whatever we wanted). Two other Sundays are poetry, I think, and one Sunday there's not a group.

Tuesday I went in to Austin again for the Just This writing group at the Austin Zen Center. It meets at 7:30, and people sign up to attend through Meet-up.  I'm a co-leader with Donna Birdwell and Kim Mosley.

We wrote to the prompt:

The world isn't the way I want it to be.
The world is just as it is.
What am I going to do about it?

We read the questions in a circle, each person taking a line, a little like what people do in a musical round, going round the circle several times.  That worked great.  I wish we had a recording of it.  Then we did our usual short meditation, twenty minutes of writing, and sharing what we wrote.  The responses, as usual echoed each other in some themes and brought out new ideas.  I love to hear what people come up with.  Some of the responses will be posted on the Just This site later this week.  justthis.austinzencenter.org

I was going to go in to Austin again tonight because several people whose poetry I love read tonight at the New World Deli for the Austin Poetry Society (Cindy Huyser, Gordon Magill, & Brady Peterson are among the group of featured readers) but I couldn't face the drive again so soon.  So I rested and swam with my hound dog Rex and began to feel more human.  Marie Cossa hosts that reading.  There are often songwriters and poets accompanied by music at the reading, and a lot of people have supper.  It's once a month the 4th Thursday of the month 7 PM.

Saturday, though, I'll go to the Georgetown public library for Poetry Aloud, the group that used to meet at Cianfrani's on the square.  It meets the 2nd and 4th Saturdays at 12:30 in the afternoon. (not quite so far for me and daylight)   Mike and Joyce Gullickson are hosting.  Or is it Mike Jones?  Joyce sent me the e mail.  Leaving aside the Just This writers, the group in Georgetown is my home group, though I've been gone so much that they might be surprised to hear that.  The theme will be Homeless, but people don't have to write to the prompt.  The group usually reads poetry but we have at least one songwriter, Ron Kewin, and a couple of people write memoir.  I feel very at home with these kind folks.

And when I'm in town I always try to make Bookwoman on North Larmar in Austin on the second Thursday evenings of the month--about 7 PM.  Fantastic poets! A big group that reads round robin one poem at a time after a featured reader. Sometimes they might have 30 or more people there, though some come just to listen. A lot of energy in that reading.  Cindy Huyser hosts it.

And festivals are coming up in October--Waco Wordfest and the Georgetown Poetry Festival.  More about the later.