My mother never enters at the right time, even in my dreams. It’s been that way since I’ve known her. She was asleep on my arrival and had nothing to say for years I had to love her—there are rules that sit in the gut, how we love, regurgitate, turn sour, bile pushes against the flap keeping it in place— that love a dandy mess of our insides— we can’t escape even when we’ve grown old, you see when she died there was a long complicated grief and panic rising, there was no control in this body that pushed hard against her a lifetime.
Julene Tripp Weaver, a psychotherapist and writer in Seattle, has three prior poetry collections, including truth be bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS (Finishing Line Press, 2017), which won the Bisexual Book Award, four Human Relations Indie Book Awards, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards; truth be bold also empowered her to start writing a memoir about her life and work as a long term AIDS survivor. She is an ‘Artivist’ in the Through Positive Eyes Project sponsored by The Gates Discovery Center and UCLA Art and Global Health. The goal is to eliminate stigma about AIDS by sharing stories. She was a Jack Straw Writing Fellow (2023). Her essay, “Babes With AIDS,” about being one of the founders of the Babes Network, a peer support organization for women living with HIV, won Honorary Mention for the Christopher Hewitt Award in Nonfiction. Her poems have appeared in many journals including: HEAL, Autumn Sky Poetry, As it Ought To Be, and elsewhere. She has received support from and attended residencies at Centrum, the University of Washington's Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center, Mineral School, Vashon Artists in Residence, and Hypatia-in- the-Woods. Website: julenetrippweaver.com; Instagram: @julenet.weaver
Visit Julene's page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Julene's collection from your favorite retailer:
|
|
|
From my mother, I inherited a dwarfed pinky toe, one tiny white spot on my skin, wide hips. From my father, his love for the Impressionists, his craving for books. From the poets, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, I inherited a love of dead things: the threadbare gold skeletons of last year’s tomatillos, the artichoke flowers that turn to dust when I try to hold them. And once, in Kelly Park, the translucent white ghosts of a mother and daughter swinging their legs from the branch of an old oak, that diaphanous light, their unendurable beauty.
Donna Prinzmetal is a poet and psychotherapist living in Portland, Oregon. She is the recipient of the 2020 Lois Cranston Prize from Calyx. Her first book, Snow White, When No One Was Looking, was published with CW Books in May of 2014. Each Unkept Secret, a finalist for the MoonPath Press Albiso Award, is her second book.
Visit Donna's page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Donna's collection from your favorite retailer:
|
|
|
|