Tricking Myself

Image of the Day:  House finch, with its purple-streaked head, and a male cardinal all got up in red, sharing space in my window feeder.  Studies in red.


So I ran five miles for the first time ever yesterday and felt pretty good!  I ran without listening to music and found a rhythm, a pace.  On the way back, I kept tricking myself, telling myself it was much much longer than it appeared, which for some weird reason, seemed to help me keep going. And then I had a social gathering event and drank vodka.  That went right to my head.  I mean I ate and everything but still.  So today I'm exhausted.   


I'm not going to do an August a Day poem thingy.  I was so tempted but I just can't this month.  But I got the Oulipo Compendium and so will be studying that.  I also cut up, in anticipation of a few Oulipo exercises, some old poems of mine that weren't working and hope to rework them into other poems that will work.  I still have poems out that I submitted in January and am waiting on.  And other newer submissions I'm watching in my submittable account, watching as they go from "Received" to "In Progress" and then checking Duotrope to see who's rejecting or accepting things.    It's a wonder I can get any other work done at all. 


But I do have a poem here at the Silver Birch Press blog.  They've paired my poem with one of my favorite artists, Frida Kahlo, and I love that the self-portrait they chose of Kahlo's has a thorn necklace around her throat.  I always wanted to do a series of ekphrastic poems on Frida, but I just couldn't get enough distance, I think, to write anything that spoke of me or to me or whatever.  Maybe some day.  Silver Birch Press is devoting the whole month of August to Self Portrait poems, so check around and look at the other stuff.  Really fantastic work.  And I do love it when journals pair the work with art.  Just so much more conversation happening. 

Bedside

Mid-drought, more sun.
When did the tumbler

of water, bedside, fill
with dust? When did you

learn you were a riverbed
no river would touch?





Andrea Cohen

The Cincinnati Review
Summer 2014