Acorns and the Barbie Head

My office has corner windows—I love being almost-outside, watching clouds gather or seeing a lone iris blooming along the shed. Before the pandemic, “work from home” meant drinking coffee downtown and fighting the urge to talk to folks instead of editing papers or drafting a poem. A year in I decided to trade my vintage student desk with the hinged wooden top for a corner desk from a thrift store. Finally, room for more than a laptop, a coffee cup, and a lamp.

Like Barbie’s head. A couple of Aprils ago I drove to the St. Louis airport to pick up or drop off authors participating in the Unbound Book Festival, a free literary fest that lasts a weekend. (This year panels and readings were virtual and spanned several months; the last event was a conversation between Tracy K. Smith and Jericho Brown.) One reason I like the airport run is my volunteer shifts don’t conflict with Unbound events. And at the airport that year I collected four authors and Barbie’s head—or maybe Skipper’s. Whatever. I couldn’t resist plucking her from a murky puddle in the parking garage. She worked her way into a poem that will be published this fall in a Black Sunflowers Press anthology.

The acorn? That’s from a workshop at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference in Lexington. Fifteen of us were lucky enough to learn from Dorianne Laux, who handed out “Acorn,” by Phillis Levin. My notes say things like acorn taught her all she needed to know about life on earth and a lesson in seeing. At a break, one of the writers in the group gathered acorns for the rest of us. I love that conference! The acorn reminds me of growth, change, and a fun weekend in Lexington with two of my favorite Dames (as in Dame Good Writers—but that’s another post).