April 4, 2015

In the Before Cancer Era

I would have answered each

Of the five phone calls

Between midnight and two

Thirty years doesn't seem that long ago

While living in the same time zone.

I would have kept all the shame

Placed on sea gulls for eating trash

Placed on the fault line’s guilty movement

Blown away by the windy desert

Stayed tattered as I hung on a flimsy clothes line.

In the After Diagnosis Era

I let the phone ring

Again and again

Between midnight and two,

Remember nights

When Mexican men stood

At my window confessing love.

I pay the gatekeeper with roses

The Virgin de Guadalupe showered,

Mortar the discarded petals

Into the cracks of a voice.

April 1, 2015

Vacuuming chemo dust

From under my bed

Where night shadows

Come alive during daylight

When the scar sears my chest.

I am lost in my home

Between stacks of empty boxes

Buried under manila files

Filled with details

All the bodies touched

By my hands

Left behind.

hair wash

First Visit

Sitting at the Dr.'s office

Breast Specialist

OK, I feel fear now

My boob hurts.

I wonder what will be said

When will be the biopsy

How often will i have to 

Come back to this office?

I am alone here.

One person offered to wait with me

I turned her down 

Wanted privacy.

Every time the white door opens

I wonder if this time the nurse will call my name

The fear started two blocks from here

Will sweetness rise out of the pain?  

Driving by Krispy Kreme 

I want to change lanes

Pull into the drive through

Order a glazed doughnut.

I breathe hard

Circular breaths

No stops between rise & fall 

Inhalation exhaling.

Waiting to see the nurse

To wait and see the Dr.

To wait for two biopsies

To wait for both results.

Reminded of being alone

The room has a small tv

The View is on

It diverts my attention.

The gown has only one tie

I can't figure out how to knot it.

The Dr. enters with hands in prayer 

His fingers open like a scallop.

Wet with afterbirth the color of Venus

My muscles squeezed tight

Betrayed by conversation's order

He said, "We can beat it!"

Can I do it....

http://www.napowrimo.net/

Haiku

Skylight frames the night
Black and white beneath my knees
Moon beams on futon

Through the Fire Exit, Down the Rabbit Hole

Kickoff 2013

May You Always Find the Way Out of Locked Places

A Gerbera daisy dropped

On a moist forest floor

In the lateness of your night

In the morning of my day

Hands reach across sheets

Hands reach across states

Fingertips touch sun-tanned skin

Bathed in Mother Ocean

Dried by Brother Wind

In the early pre-dawn

Before roosters crow

Or owls fly home

I know you are awake

Next to nothing between us

Before the map of a planet

Our earthen nature absorbs

The shock and terror

We know capable of love

Your grotto filled with water

Once empty the day before

The fire pit spat ash

Burned from dead flowers

Covered us like dust used to find

Crime scene fingerprints

Pilfered bamboo survives

Huddled in a clump

Plot of dirt saved for flowers

Chairs circle sacred space

Guarded by the old woman living

On the wild corner of the lot

She stirs her iron vat of brine

Boils down our bone baggage

Until the yellow marrow melts

Wheel barrow the color of rust

Mixing bowl for bloody mortar

Bonds your flat rock children

Wall sloped for sliding rain water

Sets pumice cinder-blocks in cement

Sharpens the corners around my heart

Trees with poison ivy spread red pain

Tree with chain embedded in bark rind

Trunk absorbs pain and strain it survives

Tannenbaum thanked three times

Held green bushy needles close

The pine surrendered to the New Year.  

 

The Winter of Sweet Potato Spirits

I waited twenty-five years

For the moment when

The earth stilled its tilt

Waited for an axis pole to shift

Waited for bodies’ ascension drift

Waited for Armageddon encampments

Waited for brothels to serve tea with sugar

The Golden Age arrived

We were alive to witness

Time lines not yet converging

Like a time lapse photo

Forgetting the moment of a camera click

We drank to the Winter of Sweet Potato Spirits. 

Poem for Palen

Betty Lou was behind me driving a hard bargain I could not afford. Forty-five minutes ago, Chew-Bacca roared like a Talking Head.

"What's Vegas say about the game tomorrow?"

Loving your lead balloon & black dog, the one Jimmy owns, howling in the night behind the Marshall speakers, you called me home....bring me home.

Christmas 2012

Santa asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I told him a Country Squire Station Wagon with wood panels.....thought it safer than saying I wanted a Woodie.

Sunday Morning

tobacco stained fingers

dipped in red lacquer

paint my matted hair
dark clots of burnt umber

clump us together

molten lava air-dried.

For April

Action
Reaction
Restart
The engine,
Full speed
At half-mast,
I want to take
A bath
Enjoy the salt
In the soak
Draw out
Toxic clutter.
My head is full
of One-
Two praise,
I love
April's
Joy.

Sound Cloud

This is my first try at Sound Cloud for recording poetry from my book, Never Offer a Chair to a Dancing Girl.

I wrote "Shallow Jazz Roots" as a response to a Jazz Poetry class I attended at the Nashville Jazz Workshop in 2002.  The Nashville Scene selected it as one of their winning poems in 2003.

This recording is from December 5, 2012.

  https://soundcloud.com/jamie-zoe-givens/shallow-jazz-roots-at-jamie

More videos from Jamie Zoe Givens (playlist)

Course of Intuition

Dark and cloudy, lost driving
on an unknown highway byway,
how do I find the direction north?
When ruby throat hummingbirds
beat wings, speed counts two
hundred times per second, do
they have an inkling their flight
is south? Is it the same instinctual
intention that takes porcupine
caribou through a migratory loop

leading to Arctic tundra calving
grounds? A flash of insight, one
may reason, reveals knowing
I don't like someone, yet not
knowing why. Is it a sudden
inspirational voting booth
epiphany that casts a name
on the ballot in a school board
election after moving to a new
location? How about the hunch

playing red twenty-two as
the roulette wheel spins. Is this
the same foreseeing when playing
a number on the company employee
Super Bowl football pool?  Is it direct
innate perception that shows which
path of faith is the correct reflection
to believe in? Do we listen for
the Buddha of Wisdom and follow
a course of intuition? Or, do we ignore
smelling the Holy Spirit's breath.

Jamie Zoe Givens interview with Ruby Givens recorded in 1985 Part Two

For National Listening Day, 2012, I uploaded an oral history project from 1985. My grandmother agreed to be interviewed by me for a seventy-five minute interview.

Jamie Zoe Givens interview with Ruby Givens recorded in 1985 Part Two

Jamie Zoe Givens interviews Ruby Givens 1985 Part One

For National Listening Day, 2012, I uploaded an oral history project from 1985. My grandmother agreed to be interviewed by me for a seventy-five minute interview.

Jamie Zoe Givens interviews Ruby Givens 1985 Part One

Appreciation Mesostic

                                from the mArket

                           below the turnPike, changing lanes

                                          an opPortunity

              the feeling was familiaR; it was like the time

                             mangos are nEver sold

                               moments? i Compared your juicy fruit

                                        with raIsins, covered in cornmeal

                              ripe for the eAting

                                       enchanTs my mouth

                       as if seeking nourIshment from

                                                gOlden festivals

                                              i kNow where i want to die

This poem is my answer to writing assignment from a Modern and Contemporary American Poetry class from Coursera. Each line is from a series of poems I wrote about mangoes. The spine spells out appreciation, the theme for a November poetry reading.  

Tomato Arts Festival 2012

My tomato themed poem for Poetry in the Brew which took place the same day as the Tomato Arts Festival.

Tomato Salad

Hot Pink Lady waits

for her Best Boy Bradley

or perhaps the Purple Cherokee

or the Black Crimean

who rides a Green Zebra.

Your blood of sun

comingles with my juicy soul

feel free to eat me

your seeds eclipse

my red Roma heart.

For G.

While playing with three black cats which crossed his path,

standing in the full brunt of a straight-line Reiki wind,

waiting for an emoticon spaceship whose lights twirl

like the smoke tendrils from exhaled dragon’s breath, he loves us.

Excluding the bwoks from chickens or barks from dogs,

fifty quiet acres surround a gentle heart. While sitting

outside yesterday (or any other day) with head tipped back

watching trees…he loves trees.

But, he is not a person who would hug a tree,

(I am sure fir and pine needles danced in the breeze)

gazing at the trees he realizes how he had it backward,

the trees were hugging him; (gee) it was quite a moment.