CREDITS

OVS Magazine, Fall, 2009, also
in their Anthology, 2010.


Chickenpinata,
a journal of poetry,
Issue Four, October, 2009.

Breadcrumb. Scabs, A Poetry Magazine, 9th issue.

Third Anthology : MEOW, pub. by Jeff Winke,
Available on Amazon.com. This publication is wonderful.
I was floored by the talent surrounding
me and humbled, to be honest.

October 2005, IBPC HR, Judge David Hernandez
March, 2007 IBPC HR, Judge Pascale Petit
October 2007, IBPC HR Judge Ethelbert Miller
March 2008, IBPC HR, Judge Fieda Brown
Thanks IBPC for the Honorable Mention, July, 2009 for Stephanie and to Judge George Szirtes whose insight into the poem will be a considerable help in future work.
Oak Bend Review, April 2009,
Rust and Moth Literary Journal, Spring, 2009,

Anthologies:

Women Celebrating Women “Remembering Faces”
The first two books in the series were Common Intuitions(2005)
and
The Woman in the Mirror (2004) sold
out within a week of the reading and is currently out of print.

Muscadine Lines, A Southern Anthology
by Kathy Hardy Rhodes (Editor)
“In this book the talents of many stand as the product of one.”
—Jackie K. Cooper

Muscadine Lines is a COLLECTION of short fiction, personal essays, and poems. Muscadine Lines offers readers the joy of discovering the treasures of promising new voices, as well as seasoned veterans.

This book is a gathering of stories and poems that epitomize the qualities readers treasure in the best Southern literature—a rich appreciation of language and humor, as well as a dead-on sense of place and character. These storytellers let their ideas, experiences, and imaginations flow from their minds to the lines, as they tell of worlds that are fictionally unique, yet realistically akin to our own.
available through Barnes and Nobles and Amazon.com

Remembering Faces (Palettes and Quills Press)
available through mail, and also email: psnquill@rochester.rr.com

Previous credits incude:

Chapbook “Past the River” D-N Publishing,
White Chimney, London,
Tipton Poetry Journal,
The Shine Journal,
Falling Star Magazine,
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Spring 2006.
Connections-A Quarterly Environmental Journal based in New Hampshire,
Spillway Review,
Facets, a Literary Magazine,
Red River Review,
Autumn Sky Poetry,
Softblow Poetry Journal, Cyril Wong, Editor
Pocket Change, Poetry and Art Journal,
The Electric Acorn, #14,
Pachamama Press,
Criterion, Archdiocese of Indianapolis,
Dallas Morning News, Easter Edition,
Tonopah: A Quarterly Journal of Prose and Poetry,
Lily, A Monthly Online Literary Review,
Muscadine Lines, A Southern Journal,
Moondance Journal, Celebrating Creative Women,
Just West of Athens,
Metromania Magazine,

LATEST PUBLICATION

I received my copy today of MEOW Poetry, by Editor Jeffrey Winke. I’m very pleased to be surrounded by such a fine group of writers. It’s a very nice publication.

Available at amazon.com

LIBRARY

I came across a poem by a very accomplished
poet, Brian Culhane, entilted “Library”
Printed online from The King’s Question,
(graywolf press) and while I don’t print other
writer’s work without their permission I just
wanted to say how much the poem affected me.

In the opening stanza he mentions his father
putting the books into stacks. I immediately
thought of Henry Bemis from an old episode
of The Twilight Zone. My favorite episode.
Why? Because its focal point is “time” and
how we have such a finite view of it. There was
Burgess Meredith running up and down
steps of a library that had all but been destroyed,
attempting to rebuild his own private aisle.
He had all the time in the world. To read.
Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, science, art.
Until his glasses broke.

My life is filled with libraries and the meaning
of them in my life has been an underlying
influence as well as a means of strength,
as far back as when I was
five years old and we lived behind one.

The poem is poignant. But its ending
haunts me as I read about the “job”
being over and the years he has left to mourn.
I can take those last lines and wrap them
around me in a variety of ways.

I cherish this poem. My last library I left
when I left the job at age 49.
It was a devastating
time in my life as well as cathersic.

Many people do mourn for years.
Not days, or weeks or even months,
but years. I don’t think it should be that way.

The eerie way the Henry Bemis episode
was fulfilled in my life few would believe.
The physical library I worked in does not
exist at present. The building gone and the books
as well. Then, my vision going awry for years
I could hardly read anything, let alone
stack a book. Now, I can. Now I only mourn
in part that time in my life. I’d rather
remember as Culhane mentions love withheld,
and spread my thoughts over those cobbled
rows behind Trement Street where the books
were all at elbow level and I ran barefoot.
Summer days, index cards, puppet shows.
Nothing to mourn and everything to read.
And as Henry said “there’s time now”

My thanks to Brian Culhane for this poem.

WINTER’S ALOE

I like to walk between the torsos
of oak, before the colors lift
their ruddy spirits from skin of leaf

wait for the sky to shed
itself into the face of a different bird

Do you ever long for mid-summer,
a backwater pond slumped over
from weeds, as evening
enters slowly then snaps shut?
I want to walk instead,
over a sea of glass,
so still in its reflection,
that you forget where you are,
and it breathes for you.

kathleen vibbert 2009

SHADOWFALL

A man once spoke the way a yellow sky rolls back.
Often our laughter would echo,
pull us along
into rows we needed to walk through
as if the journey could somehow surpass our steps:
We walked past white houses, 
retaining walls, windows with azure curtains
 and deep cherry wood sills. Books opened 
during October, yellowed, never read,

All the possibilities that once felt like gnarled 
shoulders began to embrace us. 
His palms now wrinkled from prayers, once responded to mine. 
Perhaps he walks an island, shanked against the green, 
where even the sun is unable to open his arthritic hands, unaware that he
still wanders through me, though silent on cloudy days,
crust of his beard, a shadow overcast.

KATHLEEN VIBBERT 2009

Private Rainbow

Its roots are the roots I have come to know.
Gray sheet of graphic paper,
purple branches gesture to the stars, but not for light.
A tree that begins to live outside these margins.
To yellow as other trees do,
No autumn gold left behind.
Only itself, folded inside the corners of a book.
its colors fly uprooted
tucked into the sky,
a private rainbow.

kathleen vibbert 2009

STEPHANIE

Thanks IBPC for the Honorable Mention, July, 2009 for Stephanie and to Judge George Szirtes whose insight into the poem will be a considerable help in future work.

Pelican of the Wilderness

You’re all that’s left, peripherally,
in a place where no one else recognizes you. 
in between the halo colors that wave,
my eyes still moist from the blood that redeems,
you’re the vision that dries around my brow.
And as I look up, you’re all I need to see.
A pelican of the wilderness:
who holds the floodwaters inside his beak,
the river inside his belly,
the nervous laughter from the tide.

Inspired by one of my favorite Bible verses:
Psalm 102:6
I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

We Found Her

Were you ever lost as a child and finally you hear
someone say we found her!
Do you remember the excitement
in that voice? A voice that maybe
you’d heard many times before,
but never paid attention to. Maybe
you were caught inside the coat racks at the local department store. Or maybe you got lost
as an adult, missed an appointment for a job interview
because you can no longer read street signs from a great distance.
You wanted a voice. Not a GPS, a radio, although sometimes an old familiar song can bring a
certain kind of steadiness, until you reached your destination.
I think as wonderful as silence can be,
sometimes you need “the” voice. We found her! Because you know at the end of the voice
someone is going to be thrilled to see you.
And if you don’t feel the need to hear it,
then perhaps you’re right where you need to be. Listening to your own voice, one that
often tries to desperately for an attentive ear.
One which will never leave, is always there to respond, if you only take the moment to listen.

PIRATE IN AN EMPTY HOUSE

The house we sold now sits and waits
for early autumn rain;
a pirate with a tooth of metal
languishes in pain.

Its haunted, so the townfolk say
but I cannot believe.
Those rooms, those silver photographs
the drapery’s spotted sleeve.

So hard to close the door and walk
away on cobblestone.
Oh pirate, if you’re hungry, mate
its best you live alone.

kathleen vibbert 2000