The Following Sea

Thank you to the editors of Floating Bridge Press for inclusion of my poem in Pontoon. It’s beautifully presented. The Following Sea

Bruce Springsteen and Me

Lately, you’ve read some of my poems detailing the struggle I’ve had over the year with recovering from a heart attack, my triple bypass, gall bladder surgery and pancreatitis. It was a full year of not knowing if I’d ever feel good again, or work doing what I love, or being able to do the […]

All You Who Sleep Tonight

1 year ago this weekend, I had triple bypass surgery. It’s been a very difficult year save for the brightness of my marriage to my husband, John, last summer and the continuing love he brings. I wrote a cycle of poems that I thought I was finished with, which I presented at the Rainier Valley Lit Crawl […]

Hubris

I never want to know the many things they did when they flayed open my chest, my arm, cracked my sternum and stopped my heart. Blissful ignorance is what I needed, and some drugs, buckets of them. I was reminded too much of salmon, gutted torsos, lungs, heart, parts. But that’s how they do, these magicians, these […]

The Historical Heart

Remembering everything, the heart, at last, breaks. At first, in the undulating folds as my fetus came together the cleft separated, a misaligned heart began, beating days upon days. It remembered the fall, and mother carrying me to hospital, the salt-air summers in Balboa – running full ‘round the boardwalk. The heart worked hard during […]

Star

We bring home, from far off places, things to remind us of where we’ve been, and who was there. This tin star from New Mexico is hung in our home after waiting two years for a light to brighten it. The light is found on the day my fiancé’s grandson is born, on a day […]

Appliances

When in life do you fall in love with appliances? When knobs and lights, heat and the proper lines of cool refrigerant expose the underbelly of age?  When exactly does the idea of them take hold? Is it when building a home with someone you love steals you against the outside world? When the years […]

Lambda Literary Q&A for The Narrows, Miles Deep

I was so pleased to be interviewed by Karen Schechner, Senior Indie Editor for Kirkus Reviews for the Lambda Literary Website. I thank her profusely for including me in her new series of interviews on self-published writers. Click here for the interview: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/06/26/qa-with-self-published-writer-tom-schabarum/ The Narrows, Miles Deep was first selected by Felice Picano for LLF’s 2011 […]