...and then...

It. has been. a YEAR since I've sat down to write. From this side of my pen, that is. Writing projects, yes. Scripts for one-woman shows. A children's book. A 11-minute poem that I performed with the Milwaukee Ballet.  Nothing to boo hoo about, at all.  Except these words weren't, necessarily, for me. I might have etched five poems, but I would have stirred them in a workshop I was leading or supporting. Not sure if that counts as writing for myself. When I started counting on my fingers, my eyes tracking absently across the ceiling, the math was incomprehensible. I thought of friends I'd giggled with about their comparable sex dry spells. A year, girl? A whole year, like twelve months, back to back, f'real?  My bad, y'all. In this past year, my best words were tiles for funding mosaics, grants and proposals, strategic plans, contract agreements and curricula, social media posts, text messages -sometimes a panel's worth, and eight trillion emails. ...

When you start referring to your new protagonist like a colleague you're hoping to connect with for lunch, this is how you know you’ve found your next story. That’s how I know, anyway. For months, I’d been sending lunch invitations to a character I’d met in a short story. He was a young boy then, and I wanted to know what his story might become. How did he recover? What was that thing churning in his chest? Would he be chasing life or evading death? I couldn’t know. From our brief exchange, the only thing I was certain of was that he was quiet, observant, and deeply affected by the scenario I’d written him into.  I was eager to finish his story, but he would not come. He wouldn't even give me his name! I thought, maybe, I needed to speak of him out loud in order to make him Pinocchio-real. I thought, maybe, I should start another story to coax him from my mind’s shadowed alcoves. I thought, maybe, he wanted me to sit patiently at my laptop and wait. Once, I ...

I'm reordering letters in my head, deciding the optimal combination for describing the sound below me. Thoomp. Thwump. Thmp. I'm in the tub: candles, lavender salt, merlot, ear buds, the whole nine. When the soundtrack plays itself out, I nestle deeper into the warmth, calm and, now, the quiet. Thrump. Almost immediately, I hear the sound of water dripping. Dripping steady and boldly where it shouldn't. Beneath me, beneath the tub, beneath the sub floor, I'm listening to the metered threat of a pipe leaking from my second floor bathroom onto the first floor ceiling. In breaking news fashion, my daughter comes upstairs to report that water is, in fact, leaking onto the floor outside her bedroom. "It's coming through that panel," she said sleepily. "Y'know, where they fixed the pipes before...?" "Yes, Baby," I said. "Thank you." Whhoum. Thomp. Ahmp. The heavy pulse of the water coursed my thoughts into ominou...

I was born in 1969. Around the time I was finally sleeping through the night, Jimi Hendrix was resigning to a darkness of his own. He died the following fall at the age of 27, when I was one month shy of turning one. Had I been an older girl, wide-eyed with the turbulence and fireworks of the times, I might have easily joined the pilgrimage of women yearning to stretch themselves and their lives naked beneath his musician’s trance. By the universe’s exquisite design, I was not yet capable of rolling onto my back. I’ve held barely a thumbprint of Jimi Hendrix’s story until recently (another reason why we should vote for Netflix in 2016). I was enthralled by his lifelong romance with music, to learn he was never ever without his guitar, by the enormous chunks of obsessed practice hours and simmering stock of chitlin circuit years that brewed the ingredients of his genius, by the divine precision of daring to reach up and seize his star just as one was whizzing above his head...

I'm finally reading my magazines. Maybe I should book a flight every month, just for the captured sit-still time that flying affords. I only subscribe to three magazines, four if you count  Newsweek , which used to be my favorite until they defected to a digital-only format.  Mental Floss  is my new favorite.  It's witty, whimsical, well-written and wickedly nerd-tastic. While soaring the skies, my eyes scan the lines of text left to right, left to right, left, left, left ... I keep my face pointed toward the magazine pages, but my eyes pull to the left and over the rim of my eyeglasses to steal a look at the woman seated beside me. She's reading my new book. When our flight was still grounded, I had to unseat her and her husband in order to wedge myself into my window assignment. She offered to hold my coffee after watching me try and stuff my computer bag beneath the seat in front of me. I fastened my seat belt and thanked her for keeping me from scalding mysel...

FEATURED IN BLEED, A LITERARY BLOG FOR JADED IBIS PRESS http://jadedibisproductions.com/sustainable/ SUSTAINABLE by Dasha Kelly I’m not sure when it happened, when my words fell away from ordinary, peeling away sneakers to don ruby slippers, starting requesting lemon zest and garnish. I don’t know, exactly, when my words were made to hang back in the green room waiting for a green light to shine. My words don’t think twice about being seen without makeup, in sweatshirts and jeans. They miss racing one another down to sheets of paper, squealing and breathless until they tumble and fall into unexpected formations. My words spend too much time standing around these days, clustered into genres, waiting for invitations to arrive.   They are social creatures but miss their quiet time, too. My words need to sprawl across clean pages, even to find themselves crumpled and tossed away sometimes. They are not all destined for posterity, but each mark a heartbeat in this world. ...