Photo by Emine: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pigeons-on-person-s-hand-15010957/

Matthew Murrey, LITTLE JOY

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I’m really phoning it in today—my apologies. It’s been one of those days (2 days) with a thousand interruptions. Much of it good: carpet edge is reset; electrician has rewired for the new stove and installed the light fixture over the sink; faucet and garbage disposal going in today; appliances, soon. (It looks as though I will have a working kitchen again within 2 or 3 days, early next week at the latest.)

A month or so ago I reviewed Matthew Murrey’s book, Little Joy (from The Portage Poetry Series, Cornerstone Press, 2026) for Escape Into Life. You can read my review by following this link.

And here is one poem, to demonstrate what I mean about the delight Murrey threads through the entire book:

Shifting

I was wind and sunlight again
on the El platform as a train pulled in.

Its doors opened to a woman
with wild, gray hair and loose layers

of mismatched clothes. Without one word
she tossed a blessing of birdseed for the birds

then pigeoned back from the closing doors.
I could call her crazy, but what about you and me

shifting for ourselves in our drabs and grays that hide
our iridescent purple and green fly-away dreams?

I wish I could wear my wings on my sleeve, even as I grub
for the money that gets me the food I need and the place I sleep.

—Matthew Murrey, Little Joy

Think of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” with its resounding end-line, “You must change your life.” Rilke closely observes a statue; Murrey, an old woman feeding birds. If you need a prompt today, take note of two or three things—unusual, maybe—that catch your attention today. Jot down some details from one, and, dwelling on it, consider what you might change about your own life in answer to its call.

Priscilla Long, CARTOGRAPHIES OF HOME

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CARTOGRAPHIES OF HOME, Priscilla Long, MoonPath Press, 2026.

Cartographies of Home, the latest collection of poems from Priscilla Long, divides the poems and her life into three sections, beginning with her childhood on the Eastern Shore of Maryland: turkey buzzards, garter snakes, molasses milk, honeysuckle.  In the middle section, the poems escort us through college, Viet Nam, Civil Rights, Greyhound bus stations, Viceroy cigarettes, banjo music. In the final section Long embraces old age. Also the author of Dancing with the Muse in Old Age, she does so with authority. She’s packed for this journey, and she knows what to do now that she’s here (write more).

I’ve been immersed in house stuff. First a bathroom remodel, then a leaky roof, stained carpets, a big leak under the kitchen cabinets, a kitchen remodel. (Those are only the highlights.) So of course I gravitated this morning to this poem:

House Bones

My old house. The small muntined window
in a step-up closet. A carpenter measuring,

cogitating, a hundred years ago. Kitchen
windows, cupboards of painted wood, fir

floorboard creaking its unforgetting.
The living-room cove ceiling curves down

to meet its molding. Mantelpiece, tiled
fireplace, the oak floor worn, telling me

I, too, am part of time; party also
to the tree felling, forest-killing

of house-making. I don’t forget stud
and beam, lintel, doorknob, latch,

and knocker. I look out single-hung sash
windows. Architect Louis Kahn said:

The window is a wonderful thing
from which you get the slice of light

that belongs to you and not the sun.
The ladder-back chair, wood-turned stile

and finial, its rush seat—Grandma Henry
owned it, sat in it. I now take my turn.

—Priscilla Long

You may have noticed that yesterday’s post also had a poem with a muntined window. Calling things by their right name is a signature feature in all Long’s writing: muntined, step-up closet, fir floorboard, living-room cove ceiling, beam, lintel, doorknob, latch. Such a pleasure!

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, then you know I’ve visited Long’s books before. Here’s the link to her website, and a few of my earlier posts as well: Priscilla Long: HOLY MAGIC; The Unsinkable Priscilla Long.

Priscilla Long at Folio, Feb. 2026

Two books by Lillo Way

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LEND ME YOUR WINGS, Lillo Way, Shanti Arts Publishing, 2021.

FLYING, TRAPEZE POEMS, Lillo Way, Redbird Chapbooks, 2024.

Before Lisa Ashley invited me to read with her and Lillo Way, last fall at Eagle Harbor Books, I had heard of Lillo, but had not had the privilege of meeting her or reading her work.

Lillo is named after her grandmother, stage-name Lillo Dillon (1875-1939), a trapeze artist—in a family billed as the “The Flying Dillons, Demons of the Air”—with Barnum & Bailey. The 22 poems of Flying illustrate—illuminate—the original Lillo’s life: “trained to fly,” and first put on a tight rope at age four. It’s a story that of course a granddaughter would catch onto (and no matter how her mother tried to ground her). Of course Lillo Way’s personal history is filled with acting, dancing, and choreography. And award-winning poems.

In Lend Me Your Wings the grandmother’s story also appears, but in every poem in the collection (over 100 pages), flight is interwoven with fancy. I love the sound work in these poems, and the specificity. A half-moon is framed by a window, “mullioned and muntined.” Even a poem about snoring is staged: “A bulldozer of sound. A demolition derby.” Nothing, in Lillo Way’s hands, feels ordinary. Rain in Porticello is “knives and forks frogs and ropes / halyards halberds cords and threads,” “all spangle-bangled” and falling. Clothes are tasseled and sequined, and so is memory. A performance.

Here’s one short poem to show you what I mean:

Starlets

Eighteen starlings strung along a power cable.
Sunlings, really—day birds—shining blacker
than night in the light of the longest day,
all watching the same direction, as if danger
couldn’t possibly approach from tailward.
A chorus line in a shallow proscenium theater,
each chorine staring straight downstage,
world’s shortest-legged Rockettes,
shuffling a little up or down the line.
You figure it’s the best they an do,
forgetting that their dance is all pent-up,
waiting, in the wings.

They leave the high-wire dance floor in a fugue.
A crowd of crows bursts into raucous cheers.

—Lillo Way

Having read Flying, this poem makes me think of “The Glamorous Life,” where the original Lillo shares housing with other single female performers, their half-dozen languages, their raucous laughter. Ellen Bass calls Lend Me Your Wings, “a celebration and joy,” an apt description for all of Lillo’s poems, packed tight with what lifts us: trapeze arts, beauty, dance, fire, wings, song. I invite you to take a deeper dive by visiting Lillo’s website, https://www.lilloway.com.

The Gorgeous Nothings

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Another book I’m reading—very, very slowly—is Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings, compiled and edited by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin. (Christine Burgin / New Directions, 2013). The work of at least twenty years for the editors, these late fragments and drafts, scribbled on envelopes and the backs of letters, come to life in this edition, “itself a work of art,” as Susan Howe writes in the preface. It’s the next best thing to sitting in an archive and handling the actual materials that Dickinson touched.

I attended a sunrise service this morning, and standing on a beach at dawn made me think of Dickinson and her “gorgeous nothings.” It makes me happy to be able to share it with you.