Originally appeared in ImageUpdate, a publication of Image Journal. Poetry of Visions A Horse with Holes in It by Greg Alan Brownderville Biblical visions, for all their bewildering oddity—Ezekiel’s wheels, Isaiah’s live coal to the lips—can carry a realer-than-real-life quality. A cover tears away; everything sharpens. If you’re drawn to that cocktail of wonder and fear, …
I’ve started brewing poems lately, after a long time of not. A bit about this one: For many years, I’ve been drawn to a character named Mad Maudlin, who appears in 17th and 18th century Bedlamite ballads. She was the female counterpart to a “Mad Tom o’Bedlam” character, the catch-all term for asylum inmates released …
If there’s an afterlife, I don’t know what it’s going to do with Rob and me. When we come to the door of the great beyond, if such there be, maybe we’ll sit busking forever just outside the fence, until they start throwing the rotten fruit of Eden at us. At least Death Cab wrote a …
I think it’s just a fact of our human wiring. Things close at hand: more urgent than faraway things. Fresh and novel things: more compelling than familiar things. People like me: more compelling than people unlike me. Maybe, then, after our years of seeing weepy charity commercials, it’s almost understandable: We just get inoculated against the problems …
I’ve been using this Advent series to mull over some of my struggles with the season, which has made for some serious posts. Here, I talk about my petulant Christmas cards. Here, I talk about seasonal depression. Here, I question how we’re supposed to hope when we can’t even figure out what to hope …
Yeah… we just went ahead and did it. “Santa Baby.” Because, Eartha Kitt. Pair this song with the lights display above, and you have a Very Long Island Christmas. But it’s so much fun to sing. [box type=”download”] Santa Baby Guitar: Rob Vocals: June Written by Joan Javits and Philip Springer [/box]
It’s throwback Tuesday with this little recording. Two years ago at Christmastime, the poet Elijah Burrell and I recorded “Gabriel’s Message,” and I still like how it came out. [box] Gabriel’s Message Vocals: Elijah Burrell, June Gervais (from a Basque folk carol) [/box] This song is a moment between a terrifying divine postman with fire-eyes and …
{…continued from The Light Box (Advent for the Skeptical and Weary, Part 2)} The light arrived, and it looked like this: I opened up the directions. Oh, shut up, I thought.
Here in New York, it’s normal for grown-ups to grouse about winter. Much complaining about the ice-crusted driveways and shoveling and and the dark days and the flu. That thirteenth snowfall is so magical, said no New Yorker ever. (By the way, this is part 2 of a series of little musings called Advent for the …
I guess I’ll start with the Christmas cards. Most years, if I even manage to get cards out, I make them myself. Last-minute. Stapled together with a couple of Instagram pictures printed out on our low-toner inkjet. I actually like it this way. Punk Rawk Xmas! We’d never had a professional family portrait, until a few …