23 June 2016
Wrote a poem this morning 🙂 Haven’t done that in a while 🙂 Called “The Girl Lightning Loved” 🙂
The Girl Lightning Loved
didn’t know how deeply she burned, was burned, her bones wicked through lifetime after lifetime….~Mary Carroll-Hackett
Make art about what lightning, about what lightning desires.
6/21/2016
I was raised Catholic, and in cultures that are very comfortable with the dead.
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May they rest in peace.
Amen.
Make art celebrating the dead. Or write a prayer for the dead.
6/22/2016
Hold on, to me as we go
As we roll down this unfamiliar road
And although this wave is stringing us along
Just know you’re not alone
‘Cause I’m going to make this place your home
Settle down, it’ll all be clear
Don’t pay no mind to the demons
They fill you with fear
The trouble it might drag you down
If you get lost, you can always be found
Just know you’re not alone
‘Cause I’m going to make this place your home
~written by Greg Holden and Drew Pearson, performed by Phillip Phillips
Make art about remembering you’re not alone.
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❤ ❤ ❤
20 June 2016
Here’s a solstice poem I wrote a few years ago, memory of a solstice back when I was a girl of eighteen, enchanted with a beautiful boy 🙂
This poem appears in my book If We Could Know Our Bones, from A-Minor Press ❤
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Remembering the Body as Grace
We all live in a house on fire. Tennessee Williams
1
I dream back the hot slow sky your body was above me, goldleafed and dappled in early sun, in those running heated days of baggy shorts, thin shoulder straps, loosed barefoot in the woods, where the world wore the soft warm pelts we tumbled in, skins multicolored scarfs we slid out of, slid into, each other. We were hungering home.
2
I wore some long breezy skirt, thinking Stevie Nicks would approve; in those days music made our maps, At a party to honor the March stars, I sat in your lap on Alan’s floor, after too much tequila, naming fish, aquarium after aquarium lining old apartment walls. Outside, a vernal moon split the day in two perfect halves, calling the first point of my Aries into startling alignment with your laugh.
3
Thirty-one suns have crossed the celestial equator since then, science and memory rearranging, the Earth’s elliptical orbit, bending, changing, precession, axis tugged in another direction. Spring even now is being reduced by one minute per year, singing as it goes. Naked to the native acre, bone-clear, the body knows what it knows.
4
Age has freed us from any need to hide, that sweet surrender of knowing celestial objects near the celestial equator are visible worldwide.
5
Assuming the body as love, my body remembers—you sleepy-eyed and unshaven, hair long, lit by light breaking into that space, where we tangled like sweet-sweating animals. What we didn’t know then, spring sliding home into summer, we do now, having worn these faces, lived in these skins, long enough to comprehend gravity as grace.
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Make art about a solstice memory, about the body as grace.
19 June 2016
“I buried my father/in the sky./Since then, the birds/clean and comb him every morning”~Li-Young Lee
Make art about fathers.
This week meet Carter Sickels, author of the novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury), a Finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award and the Lambda Literary Debut Fiction Award. He is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, a project grant from Oregon’s RACC, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Arts. He’s been awarded fellowships or scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. He is the editor of the anthology Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships, and Identity. Carter has taught in Low-Residency MFA programs at Eastern Oregon University, West Virginia Wesleyan College, and Eastern Kentucky.
Buy Carter’s stunningly beautiful book The Evening Hour
https://www.amazon.com/Evening-Hour-Novel-Carter-Sickels/dp/160819597X
The Evening Hour On the Way to Film!
Praise for The Evening Hour!
“But no book has captured what Appalachia is like right now better than Carter Sickels’ moving and beautifully wrought novel, The Evening Hour. So up to the minute that it feels as if the novel is being written as you are reading it, the novel takes a long, hard look at the dark, wonderful heart of Appalachia and reveals it in all of its complex beauty, ugliness, joy, and sorrow. . . This is one of the best American novels of the year, and it is a major contribution to Appalachian literature.”-Silas House, Appalachian Heritage
“Absorbing… Nearly every character is an underdog, and readers can’t help but root for them, even knowing all the while that it is futile….Sickels manages to depict the region and its inhabitants vividly, but without condescension… As a backdrop to Cole’s story, Sickels weaves in subtle commentary on the political hot-button issue of mountaintop removal. . . At a time when it’s easy for outsiders who are living comfortably to speak in terms of optimism and hope, “The Evening Hour’’ doesn’t shy away from the harsh truth that, for some, there simply isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel.”-The Boston Globe
Buy Untangling the Knot:Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity
https://www.amazon.com/Untangling-Knot-Marriage-Relationships-Identity/dp/1932010750
Read More From Carter Online:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/06/16/carter-sickels-honesty-compassion-and-grace/
https://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/wildlife/
http://appalachianheritage.net/2014/05/01/johnson-city/
http://outcity.com/carter-sickels/
http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2012/11/09/saving-trans-author-carter-sickels
http://davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-first-time-carter-sickels.html
Hear Carter Read!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3driom6OZKk
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
18 June 2016
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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