When you feel one coming, it’s called an aura. That’s not a word heard often, is it? Once, as I stood on the corner of Broadway and something, a woman with sapphire eyes and tarnished silver rings on every finger stopped beside me. She told me I had a powerful aura. For just $49 (there was a special) she would tell me my future. “I already know,” I said and crossed the street staring down the glowing red hand. My grandmother had another kind of aura, although we never called it that. We never knew there was a name for it. I have the image of her sitting on the back porch after supper in the dusty pink evenings. She wore strands of long turquoise beads around her neck, her skin wrinkled like crepe paper in the amber porch light. …
On table tops, in the deep recesses of my mind, written in
foggy breath on winter windows, behind the curtain, on scraps of paper, taped
to the washing machine, magnetically clinging to the refrigerator, etched in
black ball point inside matchbooks.
I gather them, carefully considering each one. They beg so. Distractingly. Pick me. Pick me, one squeals. I say, “You are a noun.” And it screams, “I could be an adjective if you work hard enough. If you are creative enough you will weave me into the flow, feed me to the hungry bowl of story, gulping back millions of us everyday.”
And I say, “Whew. Hold on. Let me get another cup of coffee first.” They do not wait.…
Pacifica is the fourth album by Washington, DC singer/songwriter Peter Maybarduk. Peter’s introspective songs include post-punk and symphonettes, sometimes bridging classical and rock music. He writes about transience, justice, dignity and meaning, and he arranges field recordings into his music. The Mid-Atlantic Song Contest (1300 entries) has just recognized Pacifica‘s third track, “Discontents” (Honorable Mention in the “Open” category). Pacifica features stellar musicians of the Washington, DC scene (Shawna Potter of War On Women, Kate Rears of Ladygod, Sriram Gopal of The Fourth Stream), with J. Robbins producing. You can find lyrics to the songs below here.
Peter Maybarduk – “Where is Your Heart?” Peter Maybarduk – “Failed States” Peter Maybarduk – “All of Whom I Love”
She faced
him as she spoke of how her stay was at her mother’s. She sat on a low wooden
stool on the floor, peeling the radishes and slicing them in coin shape.
Already, her nose had scrunched up. She found the smell of radish overpowering:
why even eat this thing? It’s known to cause gas in the stomach and then loud
farts. Her husband was not immune to them. But the radishes were his favorite.
Saute them in oil, turmeric, salt, and he would cram down two bowls of them in
one meal. And then he would belch and fart in his sleep all night long,
punching the fresh air out of the room. But, she didn’t want to say no to
radishes today. Not today.…
Chelsea Wagenaar’s poetry collection The Spinning Place is an intensely personal exploration of relationship, family, and motherhood. Her voice is that of a mystic, reporting to us the connections everywhere between the mundane and the sublime, the infinitesimal and the infinite. She fearlessly relates the sacred mysteries of life: the dreams of infants, the cold silence after an argument, the empty space where a barn once stood, and the miraculous odds of having been born at all.
Wagenaar’s sparkling train of thought stitches together these otherwise disparate elements, these connections we miss in the rhythm of our daily lives. In “The Spinning Place,” the first of three poems with the same title and the poem that opens the collection, Wagenaar leads us through a graceful flow of subjects, leaping from the creative writing classroom to the delivery room to the Mars Rover, singing “Happy Birthday” to itself alone on that red, alien planet.…
Julia Rowland is a multifaceted creator and an award-winning writer, producer, director, and recent graduate of the Canadian Film Centre. She developed two feature films, one of which, Parentals, is inspired by her life story with her parents. After she graduated, she was asked to produce the CFC’s (Canadian Film Centre) TV Teasers for the TV Writers program—six shoots in less than ten days which wrapped about a year ago. She’s also part of a script incubator called From Our Dark Side.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., founder and Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Rowland about her previously published piece, “Weight,” the creation of Parentals, her time at the CFC, and much more!
