Midnight Blue

A View from the Loft – Le Poeme finalist

blue widow spiders climb

precariously close,

blue cabs shimmie

       past

              where you are standing,

a woman

        pinned with a cobalt

   letter screams

       above the blue din of a

               newspaper print shop,

five girls put on

lipstick in a baby blue

bedroom,

   a knot of boys hit blue pins

   at the dark end of a bowling alley,

blue grasshoppers      pray

in the hills,   blue hope

                      in a man's heart

as  he writes a long essay,

          blue

bath water waiting, blue suds

       two people

make love in a bed of blue.

 Poetry

Ty

Poetry Publications

"Songs of Peace," poem, 1,000 Pieces of Peace 2018
"Heal," Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing  2016
"The War," poem, HIV Here and Now Project 2015
"Slumber," Red Bird Chapbooks, Broadside Project 2014
"City," Intimate Landscape, Open2Interpretation Book 2012
"What I Brought Home from San Francisco," Edge of Water,
 Open2Interpretation Book 2012 
"Cowgirls," "Flapping Between the Hands," Her Mark Calendar, 
 Woman Made Gallery, Chicago 2004, 2010
"In Flight," Saint Paul Sidewalk Poetry, MN 2009
 "Some Things I Know," Farm House Magazine & Anthology
 2008, 2009
 "Newsreel," Out of Line – Peace and Justice Anthology 2008
 "Lament," Lunarocity, New Mexico Journal 2007
 "War Stories: An Alphabet Poem," Poets Against the War  2006
 "Midnight Blue," A View from the Loft – Le Poeme finalist 2003
"A Message to Beijing," Seeing the World through Women's Eyes - 
 Book of poems inspired by the UN’s 4th World Conference
 on Women, Beijing, China (preface) 1996 

Some Things I Know

Farm House Magazine and Anthology

when you are being interviewed for television

speak slowly and look directly at the reporter

pretend the camera is not there

most people are in a hurry

you cannot stop your friends from dying

but you can hold them and repeat their names

faux Buddhas and elephants hold up the sky

at the Oriental movie palace (1927) on

Milwaukee's East Side

loss is universal

ducks travel past my window

now that the lily pads are gone