Michele Bombardier: Don't Ask Me How I Know
“A heart in extremity—what hungers, urgencies, hardships drive and deliver us? These poems,
like fierce midwives who insist on getting life to its necessity of oxygen, restore power to us,
recreate us in the process. We feel what lifts the moment, what comforts and holds us as we lean
over the abyss. Even the ability to howl our lostness in a field is a saving volition and bounty this
extraordinary poet fearlessly delivers to sustain us.”
—Tess Gallagher, author of Is, Is Not
Stardust
My mother will be returning to the night sky soon.
I see it in her shuffle, the swelling in her ankles,
the tinge of glaze in her eyes. When she can’t hear
she hides behind columns of anger and suspicion.
Maybe we’re not just stars, but their explosion.
I want transmutability to be warm and soft, familiar,
like a mother. She’s hurtling away from me, I feel it.
Intergalactic medium, they call it, the space between
stars, mostly hydrogen, almost water. I remember
as a child floating in the pool in the backyard, my mother
in her floatie sometimes bumping against me,
her sunglasses, her hat, our faces tipped to the sun.
Michele Bombardier lives on Bainbridge Island, WA, where she served as the inaugural Poet
Laureate and has been designated an Island Treasure for her outstanding contributions to the arts
and community. Don’t Ask Me How I Know, her second full length collection, was the first
runner-up for the Sally Albiso Award. She is also the author of What We Do, a Washington State
Book Award finalist. Recent work has appeared in JAMA, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review,
and others. Before returning to graduate school for her MFA in poetry at Pacific
University, she worked as a neurological specialist speech-language pathologist in hospitals and
private practice. She is certified in narrative medicine, leading workshops and retreats for
clinicians and those affected by illness or disability. She is a fellow of Hedgebrook, Mineral
School, Edith Wharton House, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, and Centrum..
Visit Michele's page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Michele's collection from your favorite retailer:
Terri Cohlene: A Conspiracy of Blackbirds
Terri Cohlene has crafted a book of surprises in her debut poetry collection, A Conspiracy of Blackbirds.
The wide-ranging poems are contained only by the boundaries of her life experiences
and imagination. The poem “On the Table” has a massage therapist attempting to knead away a
smattering of adversaries inhabiting her past: from ex-husband to childhood bully to a mother
“lodged like a lizard / around my sternum—”. The poems are poignant, laugh-out-loud clever,
and above all, insightful and touching.
—Patrick Dixon,, author of Waiting to Deliver and Mending Holes
Airing the Laundry
To avoid the iron
my mother used stretchers
on Dad’s tan work pants:
metal contraptions, forced
into wet pant legs, stretched tight,
clamped down hard, hung over
the clothesline in the basement.
She used other devices
to avoid my father.
Early to bed, up at dawn,
volunteer on the library board,
evening classes in accounting,
a job at the bank long before June Cleaver
ever thought of it.
And my father contributed:
football, fishing, graveyard shift,
garden projects all guaranteed
no paths would cross.
Who knew about PTSD
in the boomer years?
Come anniversary twenty-one,
mother breaking down,
father lectured it was our fault.
She’d snap out of it.
Obviously what she needed
was a little more help with the laundry.
Terri Cohlene taught the craft of writing at The Richard Hugo House and Whatcom and
Shoreline Community Colleges. Author of nine books for children, editor of several poetry
anthologies, and the former creative director of a small press, she is co-designer (with her son
Ross Cowman) of two tabletop role-playing games for Heart of the Deernicorn. She also wrote
and assisted her daughter Jody Cohlene Urbas in two productions of the play A Fine Circle of Friends.
She landed at last in Olympia, Washington, via Bellingham, Bothell, Juanita, Kirkland,
Mercer Island, Mt. Baker, Green Lake, Queen Anne, Pullman, Skyway, Renton & Cashmere,
She divides her time & creative energies between writing, editing, game design & serving on the
board of the Olympia Poetry Network, helping produce monthly poetry programs as well as
special events. A Conspiracy of Blackbirds is her debut poetry collection.
Visit Terri's page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Terri's collection from your favorite retailer:
