I have missed blogging for a few weeks. I have been tossing spheres in the air, sandwhiching commitments between committments strewn with distractions. But I am happy to say that I am overwhelmed with all things poetry. My review of Lynn Melnick’s “Landscape with Sex and Violence” is up at The Rumpus. I have an essay onboard for the series Writing About the Living at the Town Crier, curated by Lauren Davis; a blurb to write; seven books that I’ve agreed to review over the next few months; and preparation for attending AWP for Headmistress Press, which is suddently right around the corner. I am tossing submissions and devouring rejections. I have a manuscript floating belly up in the roiling sea of poetry.

On the home front, the Olympic peninsula did entertain a magnificent snow show over the past couple of weeks, which was more than a distraction, and my heat and my washing machine are on the blink, piles of laundry are everywhere and I finally got some wood for the wood stove. I’ve scheduled a mammogram. I have announced a retirement date, which is now less than a year away. When I retire, I want to become a poet.

Thanks to Petrichor for publishing “Bee Season”,  which sums up a lot for me at this moment in my living. 

Bee Season

          I dream of bees when I drip honey
          onto challah and apple slices. Season of harvest
          moon, new school year. Time of reckoning:
          Has enough grain has been stored for winter?

          Later is a moment poised like a diver
          over a pitch-black abyss. I wonder how we bear
          all this repetition. A perennial forecast of repeats:
          jack–o-lanterns, latkes, dyed eggs, mammograms.

          I bake honey cake for Rosh Hashanah.
          When darkness saturates winter I think about suicide.
          I always do, and I know that I always do, and so I know
          it will slowly ebb and I will outwit it. Again.

          I fast on Yom Kippur, but forget to pray.
          Drunk, I confess sins I did not commit.
          I place a stethoscope on every heart,
          grant clemency to every penitent.

          I will retire in seedtime. At Pesach.
          Will I be like one of those men who retire
          and find themselves at a loss for meaning?
          Who fail quickly, die shortly?

          I’m searching for the layer of sticky sweetness
          that is so hard to find. Not this honeycomb
          ensconced in a wrecking ball, these seismic shifts,
          this loss of habitat. The disappearance of bees.

http://petrichormag.com/9-risa-denenberg/