Author: Margaret Coombs

I write quick reviews of what I read; perhaps a better word is response. I’m going to start to post them on the blog in order to give them greater visibility and also to have more original content here. At some point, I’m sure that their amateurish nature will begin to embarrass me. Then I’ll…

2024 was an interesting year for me in terms of publications because it included three prose pieces and two haiku. In other words, I branched out. It could be that the recent difficulty I’ve had writing poetry is because I’m no longer writing the same kind of poems. Or it could be that my mind…

Sharon Waller Knutson is featuring poems about the muse in her online magazine Storyteller Poetry Review. I found the descriptions inspiring. Where does poetry come from? Where does it go? I think of it as a spirit most of the time, a spirit that won’t visit unless I invite it by opening up my senses…

Inspired by an article by David Lamb, “Revolutionary Road,” published in Smithsonian Magazine (March 2008). Buses careen on a mountain roadchickens in passengers’ laps.Cars, semis, scooters speedpast a concrete strip mall,where I dug out barracksand patched the craters left by enemy bombsfifty years ago.Prostitutes smoke at the truck stopwhere I fell in lovewith a handsome…

Two nonets.Seated at the hearth. Flames well controlled.His craftsman chair, her tufted printupholstery. Does she knit? Speculative genius,needles in hand, yarn.Motherhood andwriting goals.Good sex,too. All the ways of having sex she knowsfrom rape to ecstatic union.Threesomes, orgies, mated pairs,any gender, one-timeencounters, rivertrysts, conceptionhopes, success.Longed forchild.