We cannot have all things to please us.

It's snowing again, and hard. I find stillness in movement, so I walk till I'm wet to the knee. In the city you have to look for night where the streetlights can't find it, so you approach the underside of a stone or the vertex of a branch. Sometimes I find that slogging towards a destination, however meaningless, is more peaceful than slogging towards a master's degree. And that's all I have to say about that. Oh, and also they are working us to the bone. This so far has challenged my energy, health, mind, and stamina. Keep it coming.

On another note, across the great divide a poem of mine has been picked up by a small literary arts journal  called The Meadow, out of RENO. I was waiting for a desert school to claim it, even though UNM's journal vetoed it (but just barely? thanks). Either way it's nice to know I'm not completely out of the loop yet. And I'm stoked it ended up in Reno. The Empty Sign:

The empty sign in the southwestern desert shifts

upon its stage, wavers in the swell of the road.

We scuttle through the blood slate of the sand,

west to Arizona, to Sedona with its vortices

and a meteor’s crater, galactic shards of tectonics

scathing upwards, all wounded and hallucinatory.

Alexander says we’re a long way out of Julian,

its sunflowers and juniper horizons, but we don’t need

the map of the sign, he says the sun is enough,

and his instincts, my body in the car steaming

red shedding salt from the ocean into the rough

of the land is enough, and he covers me

with the gritty blanket to mean I should sleep

through the worst of it, the worst spin of vultures

in the August desert and the heat of their friction.

And once we hit the Sonora, where I feel my

first hate and ache, it’s no stopping till Mexico,

as if all of America were the desert we know

from its parts. Alexander promises me a bed there

where he will press into my neck, promises me

a basket full of sand dollars and beige linens,

rooted sunflowers in a terracotta pot only

if we spend nothing till then, nothing at all,

and then he tenses his forearms

against the curve of the road.
-D.B., 2009


(Somehow poems are inherently bad when printed in Italics)