I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
—Vincent van Gogh
About Lana
Cat mama, dog mama, sky-watcher, recovering coffee-addict, former New Yorker Lana Hechtman Ayers writes in a room over the garage.
Architect of the "severed sonnet" form, her poems appear in such places as Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, The MacGuffin, and Verse Daily. Author of eight full-length poetry collections, the most recent are: When All Else Fails (May 2023) and Overtures (September 2023). The Autobiography of Rain is forthcoming from Fernwood Press, September 2024. She’s also published Time Flash: Another Me, a romantic time travel novel. A sequel is in the works.
Lana leads generative writing workshops in the Amherst method, helps poets assemble their own collections, facilitates a Zoom Poetry Book Club, and manages three poetry presses: Concrete Wolf, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers.
She spends entirely too many hours watching British crime dramas and solving cryptograms with her spouse in Newport, Oregon, a town famous for its barking sea lions. Her favorite color is the swirl of van Gogh’s The Starry Night.
24” x 30”, 2021 http://DeborahDewit.com
Bubbie Zelda’s bungalow
in Rock Hill, NY
where the long dry grass
blazed
of its own light,
was a kingdom
of throaty bristling life—
frogs I chased
through muddy bogs,
crickets’ black harps rarely seen,
grasshoppers that often
landed on my knees,
and too many kinds
of flies, mosquitoes, bees.
Where has that girl gone,
who could spend hours
without need
of a single word?
Is she here now
only in the gleaming
whites spaces between
the squished bug marks
letters make on a page?
Outside, snow falls like a dream of snow falling, coastal weather inscrutable as my black cat curled beside the woodstove. Girls in sweeping hoop skirts twirl vivid oil-paper umbrellas, stroll the April parade— Japanese lanterns aglow against slow, gray sky. One ruby Fuji apple dropped by an onlooker rolls in the gutter— a spark shorn of its wick. Halts at a storm drain. No one dashes to reclaim it. It’s late afternoon in the twenty-first century. Silence is an attitude of shadow. I turn from the drafty window, my green tea still steaming. Clouds swirl within the bone-white cup, whirling eddies, snow drifts in pale spring light. My life is far from over.