by Laurie | Jun 27, 2025 | Blog
That last event, Unsilenced Grief, wet my poetry-whistle and subsequently I blew out a series of poems that moved from the darkness of traumatic grief into the light of the present…the light of healing. The poem from that installation, Now That I Don’t Need...
by Laurie | Jan 26, 2025 | Blog, Death
Lee and me: The beginning of the end. And then there was one. The fact that five of the seven that comprised my family were already dead was indisputable. The sixth, my only full-blood brother (the one with the same blood mixture as me) was what I had come to think of...
by Laurie | Jan 26, 2025 | Blog, Death
Lee and me: The end. Then again when he drank Dad’s morphine, I was at his ICU beside the next day, trying to coax him back. Like a reverse Horton Hears a Who episode…I was trying to reach him way down in Whoville… my voice getting smaller and smaller, diving down...
by Laurie | Jan 26, 2025 | Blog, Healing
When I was being shaped and baked in the oven of Berkeley in the sixties – being straight – as in socially conservative or aligning with the establishment was a liability, a slur. My brother Lee used to scorn “The Straighties” (pronounced Straight-teeez)...
by Laurie | Feb 21, 2023 | Blog, Death
My brother Joji was born into post-bomb-drop Japan. A “brown-skinned-bastard” from a Black American soldier. I imagine his young Japanese mother, as the earth shook for a moment, then blew away. What could she have thought about the new world of sickness,...
by Laurie | Jan 17, 2022 | Blog
Just my luck! I moved to Vermont for a more peaceful life, and the craziness of the world just followed me here. Yes. Vermont is very much engaged in the fight for social justice. In my small town we have Trump supporters & graying hippies living side by side. And...
