Grace Cavalieri




Learning from Buddha

 

The cat likes to lick

a piece of butter

at the end of a knife

propped up by the window

so he can watch the birds

today I forgot the butter and the knife

he didn't care

he knows

some days

there are no birds.

 

 

Stunned

 

I don't know about dropping a full bottle of wine on the pavement in Pisa

Or both leaving our hats in the locker room in Maryland on the same day

Or talking about our neighbor in West Virginia who killed his cat

As we stand hand in hand looking

At the milk of the moon shining on the whole world

I alive—you dead—saying if this could happen, anything could.



Note:  Grace recently lost her beloved husband, the sculptor Kenneth Flynn, one of whose sculptures is the subject of a poem of remembrance by Sonja James elsewhere in this issue of Innisfree.



Grace Cavalieri's newest publication is a chapbook, Gotta Go Now (Casa Menendez, 2012).  She's the author of 16 books and chapbooks of poetry, as well as 28 produced plays, short-form and full-length. Her recent books—Millie's Tiki Villas, Sounds Like Something I Would Say and Anna Nicole: Poems—are on Kindle's free lending library.  For 35 years, Grace has produced and hosted "The Poet and the Poem" on public radio, recorded at the Library of Congress and transmitted nationally via NPR and Pacifica. She is the poetry columnist for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Her play "Anna Nicole: Blonde Glory" opened in NYC in 2011. Her play "Quilting the Sun" opened in S.C. in 2011.









                                    

 

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A CLOSER LOOK: D. Nurkse

Morgan Bazilian

Jeffrey P. Beck

Anne Bryant

Grace Cavalieri

Norma Chapman

Joan Colby

Amber Rose Crowtree

Stephen Devereux

Chidsey Dickson

Alixa Doom

Kimberly Glanzman

Jane Ellen Glasser

Taylor Graham

Alicia Hoffman

Sonja James

Michael Lauchlan

Mercedes Lawry

J.T. Ledbetter

Hailey Leithauser

Hailey Leithauser interviews Averill Curdy

Steven Levery

Lyn Lifshin

Joanne Lowery

Michael H. Lythgoe

Janet McCann on Barbara Crooker

Judith McCombs

John McKernan

Roger Mitchell

Charles Patrick Norman

Simon Perchik

Perry L. Powell

Stephen S. Power

Oliver Rice

W.M. Rivera

William Ruleman

Sherod Santos

Anjali Angelika Sarkar

Ed Shacklee

Matthew Buckley Smith on Averill Curdy

Noel Smith

A.B. Spellman

Robert Joe Stout

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