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Archive for May, 2024

A Blissful Evening of Poetry, Music & Wine
May 28, 6 p.m. 
Palisade, CO
The Ordinary Fellow Winery
Free

Join me for a fun evening where we’ll remember just how good it is to be alive. Opening music by guitarist Geoff Crumbaugh and an optional open mic after I read. For more information and to register sign up HERE

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Ars Nova Singers: Fruition
June 8 Denver, Central Presbyterian Church (also livestreamed) 7:30 p.m.
June 9 Boulder, The Dairy Arts Center 7 p.m. 
$30 ($10/student)

Join me for Shared Visions—a remarkable interdisciplinary collaboration that brings together artists from across Colorado. Four artists, four poets, four composers, and some of the finest singers in Colorado! It’s also showing June 7 in Longmont, but I won’t be there. Find more information about the event, the artists, the singers and the collaboration, plus tickets here

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6 Creative Writing Workshop
Tuesdays June 11-25 10:30 a.m. – noon
Tuesdays July 9-23 10:30 a.m. – noon
Lone Cone Library, Norwood, CO
hosted by Think 360
Free

Writing to Remember (6/11, 6/18, 6/25)

What do memories of our youth have to teach us now? If we could speak to our younger selves, what would we say? In this three-week class, we explore how reading and writing poems helps us to be curious about our stories and see them in a new way.

Writing the Land (7/9, 7/16, 7/23)

How does living on Wright’s Mesa inform who you are? How does it influence the way you see the world? What thrills you about it? What keeps you here? What makes you want to leave? In this three-week class, we’ll read and write poems that help us explore our relationship to this place we call home.Come to as many as you can, but no obligation to make them all. All levels of experience and inexperience welcome. For info, visit here

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with its two-foot-long green fringe
and suggested I could borrow it,
I felt that long familiar clench in my chest
as the word no puckered on my lips.
The clench said, who was I
to borrow clothes from Molly Venter?
It said who was I to wear
flirty and sexy green leather fringe?
It said, can’t you dress yourself?  
I don’t know why I held out my hand,
but as soon as I did, I relaxed.
That whole night, as the long green fringe
swished and swayed all flirty around my thighs
no one else knew I was dressed in kindness.
No one knew I was alive with the blessing
of new friendship. But perhaps they could sense
I was honey-blissed on the inside with the thrill
of wearing Molly Venter’s vest,
so much more than just a sleeveless scrap of fabric—
I was wrapped in the velvet of her voice,
the willow tree of her wisdom,
the raw delight in her guitar
and the freedom that comes when
we receive the gifts of others.
Days later, dressed a slouchy cardigan,
I’m still wearing the generosity I saw in her eyes
as she handed me the vest—
I feel that fringe swish with every step I take.
 

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June 5, 2024
7-9pm ET, 6-8pm CT, 5-7pm MT, 4-6pm PT
hosted by Evermore on Zoom

When we lose loved ones, writing can be a powerful tool for helping us remember them, helping us re-encounter the world without them, and helping us re-know ourselves as the loss transforms us.

In this two-hour online program, Evermore Poet Laureate Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will offer a few suggestions for writing. Together, we will read poems about grief and discuss them. We will have chances to do our own writing, there will be optional time for sharing what we wrote, and we will have time to reflect on the effect writing has on us.

The poems we read and write won’t be able to hold all the feelings, but they will offer us a way to touch our grief, to connect with the lives and deaths of our loved ones, to give voice to our anguish, to find compassion for each other, to fall in love with the world that is left, to express our heartache, and to explore the landscape of our hearts.

All registrants will receive a recording 

Each workshop will offer new, inspirational poems and invitations to write.

If you need an angel ticket or have any questions, please contact jena@evermore.org To register, visit Evermore

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If an arrow strikes you, you feel pain where it enters. If a second arrow strikes the same place, the pain is greatly intensified. The first arrow represents unwelcome events, such as rejection, loss, failure and injury. The second arrow represents our reaction to these events, such as worry, fear, anger, criticism and despair.
—gloss of the Buddhist teaching from the Sallatha Sutta, “The Arrow”


In the moment after the first arrow has hit
is a small gap in which I sit and reel
from the pain of the tip.
How raw I am then, stunned
by the burn, by the sting.
How easy in that moment
to wound myself again
with second arrows
fashioned of shame and blame.
As if it’s wrong to be hurt.
As if I should have evaded being hit.
In that gap before I raise my own bow,
before I nock the arrow,
before the tension builds in my arm
from pulling back the string,
there, I want to build a nest,
a safe and spacious place to rest,
a place where I feel the pain
and treat myself with the same gentleness
I would offer anyone else who is hurting.
I want to weave in blue and green ribbons
of tenderness and let my body feel what it feels.
I want to curl into that gap
with all my senses open,
want to let the throb be throb,
let the ache be ache,
and surround it with enough softness
that it can heal.
Such a sacred gap, that moment
in which I choose to let my arms hang by my sides,
choose to put down the arrow
and weave the bowstring
into the nest.

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All the Excuses


 
 
At the entrance to City Market,
the man in the ripped yellow shirt
called out to the cars
with maniacal glee,
his laughter a symphony of madness
his smile gaping wide to reveal
missing teeth, his eyes flared
as if daring conversation. If he had
a cardboard sign with a few words
in permanent marker
to tell his story, I did not see it.
Why did I not stop at the curb
beside him and roll down my window
and ask him what he needed?
There he was in the rearview mirror,
still waving his arms as if begging
the whole world to wave back.

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On a day when I am at war with myself,
when I battle my own humanness
in a longing to be good, to be better
than good, to be perfect,
when I point to myself with a snarl
and a sneer as if I am my own enemy,
then I notice how my whole body contracts
and I’m a crumpled up map, a gray lump in the throat,
a stone in the gut, a crumpled wing in the chest.
And it’s hard to breathe. And it’s hard to move.
That is when I’m grateful to have a body,
grateful for the way it helps me remember
I have a choice to meet this moment with kindness.
It’s as if, mid-combat, I’m delivered a postcard
with a forever stamp sent from my wisest self saying,
Dear woman who thinks she is not good enough,
I see you. It’s okay to feel this way.
And what looked like a battlefield a blink ago
now looks more like a vast green meadow filled
with low golden light where all parts of me
are welcome—the one who makes mistakes,
the one who judges, the one who longs to be good,
the one who thinks she shouldn’t have to learn
the same lesson again. There is no part of me then
that is not welcome, that cannot be loved,
and my body expands like a great alpine basin,
unfurls like an unending white flag.
How easy it is then to stand with all of my selves
in that field and know what it means to be home.

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Anxiety


 
 
Like a cat that finds
the lap of the person
who doesn’t want it,
anxiety keeps nudging me,
leaping up to my lap,
curling deeper in,
and no matter how
many times I push it
away, anxiety returns,
kneads into the parts
of me that are soft,
as if it knows it could be
so comfortable here
if only I’d stop
all this flailing.

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The Waking

When I wake, it’s your silence
beside me that invites me
to wake into my own silence,
and I begin the day with listening.
By heart I know the difference
between the quiet of your sleep
and the quiet of you dreaming.
and it is by tuning to the gentle
hinge of your breath that I
relearn my place in the world.
Even before my eyes are open
I greet the dawn-drenched day,
not with an alarm but through a doorway
of trust. How quietly opening happens.

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I am just so darn excited for Saturday! I’ll be sharing the stage with some of my musical heroes–Molly Venter & Eben Pariser of Goodnight Moonshine, my amazing guitar player Steve Law, and my soul-brother storyteller & wonderhuman Craig Childs. Plus a preconcert writing playshop at the wonderful KVNF radio station hosted by Paonia Books.

Saturday, May 18
12-2 p.m.
A Poetry Writing Workshop with spoken word poet/musician Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Presented by: Paonia Books
Risking Love: Writing Poems that Help Us Fall in Love In With the World as It Is
AT KVNF Community Room 233 Grand Ave, Paonia
Visit: https://www.paoniabooks.com/classes to register.

8:30-10:30pm
Moonshine Family Traveling Medicine Show feat. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer & Steve Law
with Special Guest Craig Childs
Presented by Pickin Productions
Blue Sage Center for the Arts, 228 Grand Ave, Paonia Co

Acoustic Duo Goodnight Moonshine combines the evocative voice and songwriting of Molly Venter, with Eben Pariser’s adventurous guitar playing. The result is folk music with a depth of improvisation usually reserved for jazz. For one night only, they will be joined by poet, Rosemerry Trommer, guitarist Steve Law, and special guest Craig Childs for an evening of guitar picking, storytelling, poetry, and mind altering hypnotic inductions.Tickets Available at: pickinproductions.com

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Beside the flower bed, still unplanted,
we sit on the porch with coffee and toast
and watch the field where the swallows
swoop and dive in their own ritual of breakfast.
Hummingbirds chase each other across the grass,
small bodies like darts that pin us
to this moment. Would I, if I could, pin us
to this radiant now when the whole world
is greening and the morning sun paints
gold on every surface? Or is its value
partly based in how quickly it passes?
So while I can, I sink into this measure
of bliss, cup still warm in my hand,
and breathe in the sweet, sharp scent of grass.
Someday soon, there will be flowers.

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