Dispatch From the Edge

A Wilderness Alphabet By Peter Anderson   Let their names remind us of our shared inheritance 100 million acres, roadless and wild. From Absaroka to Apache Creek … From Ansel Adams to Allegheny, hallow Black Bear and Great Bear, be a witness for Bald Knob and Big Gum Swamp, in Copper Salmon, swim like one, …

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River Town

By Craig Nelson   In winter, the rocks at the bottom are what we see first, drawing us under the scalloped patterns, then cottonwoods resplendent with fractured light, and lovely breezes, and the water flows timeless past the rail yard littered with rusted iron and coal dust from the days when the mountains swarmed with …

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Book Review – Belle Turnbull: On the Life & Work of an American Master

by David J Rothman, Jeffrey R Villines, eds.
ISBN: 978-0-9641454-9-8
Pleiades Press, 2017
$16.00; 201pp.

Reviewed by Eduardo Brummel

David J. Rothman is Director of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Gunnison’s Western State Colorado University. He is also, as anyone who’s recently spent time with him already knows, a passionate advocate for Breckenridge-based poet, Belle Turnbull (1881-1970), whom he describes as, “one of the strongest poets yet to emerge in Colorado.”

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Reviews: even now

even now
By Jill Sabella & Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Lithic Press, 2016
978-0-9962170-9-5; 90 pp.; $20

Reviewed by Lynda La Rocca

It’s called “synergy.”
And it’s a fancy word to describe what happened when Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Colorado’s Western Slope Poet Laureate, and Snowmass-based visual artist Jill Sabella joined forces to create the poems and drawings of even now, a collection that epitomizes the idea of a whole becoming greater than the sum of its already-lovely parts.
Published by Fruita’s Lithic Press, an independent small press founded by Colorado poet Danny Rosen, this 6×6-inch book, printed on heavy, cream-colored paper, is a collaborative exploration of the concept of “threes.” It pairs 45 three-line poems by Trommer – whimsically referred to as “haikulings” – with an equal number of Sabella’s elegant, Japanese-style, sumi-e black-ink paintings, all executed using just three brush strokes.
Continuing the tripartite theme, even now is divided into three sections subtitled “undoing another button,” “given wings,” and “unruly blossoms,” lines that strike me as a poem in themselves. And, as Trommer and Sabella write in the book’s introduction, this poetic and painterly “journey into three” forms a collection “in which the poem is one piece, and the image is another, and you, dear readers, are the third.”

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The Wind Trap

By Joyce Gregor, Westcliffe, CO The cabin door blew open. I entered, invited by the wind who had forced its way in, through cracks and broken windows. We stood there, the wind and I, engaged in airy chatter. The wind had reveled here before, now it was my turn to view the decor. Breezed through …

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Poetry – Dry Creek

Dry Creek By Cole N. Foster, Alamosa, CO Tic, tic, tic, tic, tic – the mouse trundles his tiny trail Just inches back of my head, on the edge of the crusty canvas wall Of the tent Carroll bargained for at the San Diego Goodwill And the pinpoint raindrops murmur on and on, so gentle …

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Poetry – EEEEEk!

EEEEEk! By Maria Weber, Buena Vista, CO One group of mice underwent bile duct litigation (BDL), where the bile duct was obstructed to cause an accumulation of bile in order to trigger liver fibrosis. The other group was given carbon tetrachloride, a potent toxin which damaged the liver. Both groups were fed capsaicin (the component …

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Poetry – Dearly Beloved

Dearly Beloved Direct observation along the Arkansas Riverwalk By Doris Dembosky, Westcliffe, CO An old man pushes an elderly woman in a wheelchair. He leans into his task as if into a headwind. His age-spotted hands grip the handles of the chair. He lifts his head to judge the distance along the hard-pack, riverside path. …

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Poetry – Ideas…Matter

Ideas….Matter By David J. Rothman – for Wendy Videlock They scatter and sing their truths, their liberty, and invisibly change everything. Meanwhile, the dust, mostly space, remains a squatter and does nothing except face what it must. David J. Rothman serves as the Director of WSCU’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, and directs the Poetry …

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Poetry – the calculus of you

the calculus of you By Aaron Abeyta, Antonito, CO a balloon is rising at the rate of 5ft/s a boy is cycling along a straight road at a speed of 15ft/s when he passes under the balloon it is 45 ft above him how fast is the distance between the balloon and the boy increasing …

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Poetry – Whose Shoes

Whose Shoes By Art Goodtimes – for Michael I walk a mile out the Orvis front door before I realize whose shoes are whose Shortly after your unclosed eyes watched, half-dressed as I laced up the wrong boots & chatted you up about everything except the obvious if inadvertent theft

Nomadic Poetry – You Don’t Have to Suffer

You Don’t Have to Suffer By Craig Nielson You don’t have to suffer like the hungry finches who arrive like Penitentes when the irises first glean themselves into cerulean skies. You don’t have to save the drowning in Bangladesh or stop the soybean plantations from creeping over the volcanic hills. You don’t even have to …

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Chaffee County Poet Margery Dorfmeister Uplifts the Spirit

by Nancy Best Warm, welcoming, peaceful, calming – Margery Dorfmeister’s well-appointed home is all these things. It invites you to come in and stop awhile. Leave your cares by the road. Your worries won’t even make it through the front door. When you step in, your eye is captivated by large windows joined to make …

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Nomadic Poetry – Querencia

Querencia By Peter Anderson Is the space where we are most at home The sound of the word takes me to water, to the river maybe, the nose of a kayak in the heart of a wave, as it spills over a ledge curls back upstream, crests and falls again crests and falls again and …

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Nomadic Love

by Eduardo Rey Brummel Back in 2003, when Craig Nielson was hosting monthly “P3” (Poetry Prose Performance) evenings at the former Bongo Billy’s Café in Salida, he would occasionally witness ensemble performances, which he had also seen during a local poetry festival named Sparrows. Liking the idea of working with other poets, he conceived of …

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Poetry – Revenant

Revenant By Joseph Hutchison Colorado Poet Laureate Thin fire flickers in the nest of old news and skeletal sticks in the grate’s cradle, wrestling its own torpor as it strains to lift the flue’s load of year-end cold. You ponder how it dozed in the starter’s flint, then sparked out, unfurling a plume on the …

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From the Editor

by Mike Rosso Let me begin by declaring that I am not a poet. My attempts at poetry were limited to bawdy limericks penned in grade school. My college journalism teachers did not cover poetry along with the Five Ws. But I do enjoy the medium. Langston Hughes and Charles Bukowski are among my favorites, …

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Heading Home

by Maria Weber I have a fondness for fire, For stew pots with fragrant ingredients, Comfort food that wraps a blanket Around my heart in cold weather. My ancestors came from high frozen mountains With high frozen hearts that needed to thaw. On a beach under the heat of a dead volcano I find my …

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Old Monarch Pass – Winter 2012-13

By Ed Lambert, Salida, CO

Buried in waist-deep snow,

this century-old, mostly abandoned roadway

is a pleasant cross-country ski among healthy pines

to airy 11,375 feet windblown, old Monarch Pass summit.

Meandering north and south from here,

this twisting ridge of cold granite,

a massive, magnificent swelling of earth,

divides the North American continent,

like God parting, for His chosen, the Red Sea,

splits the pristine, frigid plentiful waters born here,

that then flow great distances east or west,

eventually stirring into salt-water bosom of Atlantic or Pacific.

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FROST AND FLOWER

And now it is October in these mountains.

Here and there, a clutch of leaves

keeps glowing burnished gold.

Most blew down in that first storm,

crumpled browner on the earth

than earth that swallows cold, dry bones.

Yet somehow, and who knows just how,

those dead leaves still smell faintly of the spring.

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Convection

– by Magda Sokolowski

Like a jackrabbit the desert reared up

against the high-cold in green-grey clots.

The cheat of grass, the sheen of ice-ground,

dense & the dull straightaway of road,

the welcome turn – sudden & slow

to find them there.

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Flaming Om

by Celeste Labadie

It’s a conspiracy,
someone said,
but I’ve done this myself.
I’m collecting things.
Drowning in stuff.
Clinging to memories while
packing and repacking what
I’ll surely leave behind
when the big whatever
has its way with this corporeal sensibility.

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Sand, Wind, and Light: Great Sand Dunes National Park: An essay in words and images

2007-2009
By Ed Berg
Blurb, Inc: May 2009. $14.95

Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel

The San Luis Valley is a distinctly different world. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the Valley’s unique nature is the thirty-some square miles of sand dunes serving as foyer for the Sangre de Cristos’ western flank. In the same view, you have Lawrence of Arabia sands foregrounding snow-stippled mountains, with Medano Creek pulsing at your ankles. In his book, Sand, Wind, and Light, author Ed Berg begins where we all do – attempting to reconcile the existence of the Great Sand Dunes:

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The Best Poets?

Dear Editor and Readers,

I write in response to a letter in your May issue penned by Mr. Simon Halburian.

Mr. H. sez… Aspiring writers need to read some of the best poets so they can judge whether their verse compositions, which should never be called poetry, rise to that level.

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Poem to the Editor

oh i wish i was the captain
out on the arabian sea
get hassled by some locals
uncle sam gonna rescue me
gonna send some big destroyers
and snipers one two three
gonna poach them hapless people’s fish
and get away scot free

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Celebrating National Poetry Month

by Jennifer Dempsey

Thirteen years ago, the Academy of American Poets established April as National Poetry Month. During this month,?poets and poetry lovers?everywhere celebrate the art form that, writer David Ignatow claims,?“almost makes up for the estrangement?among the human race.”

Central Colorado is home to hundreds of remarkable poets and in?honor of?National Poetry Month?a few?reveal what makes them tick.?

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Stirrings


Our windows are flung open

to air full of promiscuous arias

from feathered beings hopping

the leafless, monolithic, barked edges

when, a murder of crows swoop in

to steal the hanging, gooey suet,

then lift away, black and ragged,

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Sparrows won’t roost in Salida this year

Brief by Central Staff

Poetry – February 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine

There will be no SPARROWS poetry festival in Salida this year, for reasons that remain unclear.

SPARROWS stood for something like “Songs, Poetry, And Rhymes Raise Our Winter Spirits,” and it was a bright spot during the dark times of late winter, for it was held in February or early March every year since the first one in 2001.

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