A Stack of Valentines

Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope you’re having a good one, and if you’re not, I hope the remaining days of February are much better.

Every Valentine’s day I remember when my son Ruben was just a little over a month old. We were coming home from a doctor’s appointment and Ruben was fussy in the car so I decided to stop at a cafe. Inside, there was a man there who had a baby too, but his baby was as chubby as could be, could already smile, laugh even, and was shuffle-walk-crawling his way around a little table while holding a pretend phone with one hand and the table’s edge with the other. I told the man he had a cute baby and he told me that it was the baby’s 1st birthday. I marveled at what 11 more months could look like. What’s his name? I asked. “Valentine,” he said. Oh! I said. Then I said: “Happy Birthday and Valentine’s Day, Valentine.” Then the man asked what my baby’s name was and I said, “Ruben.” And then the man said his own name was Ruben. And so, we were two Rubens, two Valentines (one person, one day) and a Barrie.

Here’s a love poem:

Earlier this week, I recorded a new podcast with a special guest: My sister, Wendy Cole! This time, the themes of our 3, 5-minute long conversations all had to do with love. A little about Wendy: Wendy served as the director of Maple Street School for decades and now works as a therapist, minister, activist, and more. Ideas, play, rituals, and surprises are what she’s all about. Here’s the podcast:

Book News: The pre-sale period for my book, Lacquer is a Thrilling Word is exactly half over. Almost 100 books have been ordered, so I’m just about halfway to my goal. If you enjoy my writing, need more books in your life, want to change up your book group, or want to prove to your friends that poetry is accessible and can be funny too, please: Order my book here. Then, maybe you’ll forget you ordered something and when my book is released in May, you’ll receive an unexpected present from yourself. Also, it’s Valentine’s Day and the cover is pink.

Also, here’s a tiny Valentine:

To hear the whole poem along with some others, please come to my online reading on February 28th at 7:30 pm CST with special guest Sheri Reda. No ticket or payment necessary. Here’s the link: Poetry Reading passcode: writing

Winter Stuff
Last weekend I was in Devil’s Lake leading a writing retreat with regular attendees of the Wednesday and Friday free writing groups. Devil’s Lake is in Wisconsin about halfway between Chicago and Minneapolis. We wrote and ate and talked and slept and wrote some more and even sang parts of 40 different songs in a row and a few of us went Cross-country skiing over the lake while ice -fisherpeople fished through holes they’d carved around us. Some had cool shacks with word-burning stoves and gigantic dogs.

I loved the whole thing and it was especially nice to see the writers from Minneapolis safe and out of the chaos for a couple of days and also great to hear upon returning, that ICE is leaving. Right after the retreat, I’d enrolled in an intensive workshop with two master poets: Ellen Bass and Marie Howe. I was thinking about the retreat, which had just ended and rituals and writing and on the 2nd day of the workshop I wrote this draft of a new poem:

Customs Enforcement

If only ice agents acted on behalf of ice, if they worked in service of all the cubes resting in their communal plastic beds, if they protected the long beards of crushed ice pouring out from freezer doors, if they honored the customs of glaciers, the immigration of bergs, if they enforced their own presence on the snowbanks of the great lakes as an audience to the waves performing their traditional winter show called Rain in Reverse: a romance. The waves kiss everything

And if only we could witness the Tujia women from China as they draw their barrels of sorrow from wells on the other side of the world.Do you know their crying lessons begin in childhood and once proficient they learn to sing as they cry. They have singcrying contests to train because before their wedding day, they must singcry an hour a day or more for a month.

Oh, what is this poem about? God, what could it mean? What should we do? Tell me please. I’m listening.

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