Romantic Dogs in Best Undergraduate Writing of 2009!

It got in there!

Here is the link.

poem 12: The Nest

The Nest

The home was a threat before the hornets froze out in this year’s short winter. Since December I watched the nest deaden. In March I cut the branches from the tree.
It was the weight from the shell that made my body
ache and the caved wall in the side of the beast
that exposed its thousand eyes, the jealous lover.


With its eyes, its shell, its wanting,
the old hive made me a woman.
So now I can eulogize
half the population with:
she was a woman too.
Meaning: we are organs
and all the keys are down.


I learn yearly how to love.
This usually happens at the start
of fall. Now I am half way through
the year and I am hungry.

*

Reading about hornets, I learn the queen
can survive through the harshest months
in a slumber. I learn she is home and bodied.

-marlo barrera, march 2010

How to Make a Bird Sound

Hornet's Nest

Over the winter I had watched a hornet's nest in Oberlin. When I was pretty positive everything in it had frozen dead, I left a note in the mailbox of the house it was in front of. He gave me permission to cut it down. The neighbors were afraid of it anyway.

Here are photos of the incredible treasure (click to enlarge the photos):

    

poem 11

Telling you this now is like holding
a flattened penny between my palms,
is like watching you out of the corner
of my eye in the morning, your eyes
getting used to the light. I’m telling you

I want to believe in god and here I am
pushing myself toward love with such velocity
that I think maybe a South American
poet could fall in love with me
now. We will break each other’s hearts.

I will learn exactly how
Borges feared the sea.

I will take that fear and bend it
into a tunnel that only this poet
and I could live in, huddled up
without waiting. Once I fell in love

with every stranger I ever met.
I would tell them how our days began
destined to meet each other,
fall in love and make each other
feel worth a damn.

It’s not until I give myself over
that even the sea will see
fit to take me.

Know: I want to run into something
hard with my body. Like spit
first hitting the oil, I want to fry.

I will go driving in the countryside,
die at the sound of a barn swallow,
myself and the machine
intimate with a strong tree.


-summer2009
marlo barrera

Glass Flowers: the Ware Collection and Poem 10

Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka were glass artists from Dresden, Germany commissioned by Harvard University from 1887 to 1936 to create realistic replicas of plants.  At the time there was no way to preserve and showcase plants to the public in their original, live state so glass was used instead.  The two men made thousands of these models with no apprentices or help.

I got a book called Glass Flowers in Nashville, TN at Bookman, Bookwoman Books.  It was printed in 1940 and has drawings by Fritz Kredel of 16 of the pieces from the Ware Collection, all with a focus on pollination.  Each plate has a substantial description of the pollination of each flower.

It is the most beautiful book that I own.

Here are three of my favorite plates illustrated in the book.  Click on them for a better look.

  

The collection is at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

-----

Here is a poem of mine from 2008.  I have been posting older things because currently I am working on writing a bird field guide and a collection of nests.  They have me preoccupied.

Recently, the two of us love with both
our hands, fondle sad things like hems,
corners, the edges of cherry orchards.

This is said to have made us both a little less
lonely seeming—we have suddenly become

landlocked. I speak brokenly in clock-tongue,
now. I only crane my neck. I know
only what it means to pray.
This is the North,

we discovered.
The definitive.
The North. So looking at you now
is like watching the compass settle,

finally. Today on the steps of a church was a woman
mourning someone her head thrown back,
hands pressed tightly to her chest without delicacy.

Help me identify these feathers, please!

Here are some feathers I have found and been given in the last year.  I am sure what a couple of them are but I guess not so confident.  For the life of me I could not figure out how to put text on the images so here is some information.

These two feathers are both pretty large.  The first one (a) is about 7.5 inches while the other one (b) is just slightly bigger.  (a) was found in Oberlin, OH and (b) what found in Pittsburgh, PA.  I suspect (b) is some sea bird.

This next group is great.  They will be named (c) through (g) from left to right.  They are all much smaller than (a) and (b).  All five were found in Oberlin, OH.  

**UPDATE: (c) is from a Northern Flicker Woodpecker (there are 7 species of woodpecker in Ohio) and (f) is a confirmed blue jay feather.  Hooray!

Here are their sizes:

(c) about two inches long

(d) two inches (I LOVE this one)

(e) almost three inches

(f) This one is my favorite.  It is about four inches long.  The other side does not have the pretty blue markings, only the black and white.  I suspect this is from a blue jay.

(g) I think this one is from a cardinal.  It is about 4 inches.

Please post any inklings of suspicions or pass this blog around to people who might know.   Also, if you have a feather you loved once or haven't had the chance to love and want to get rid of it, send it my way.  Just ask for my mailing address.  In return I will send you something nice.  We could trade things.

Here are some other things I collect:

-field guides and nature guides (especially those that are hand drawn or a strange sort of topic--- I have one only for eggs-- and those that are full page drawings too.)

-navigation guides and guides on what things I can eat (i.e. edible wild plants, mushrooms)

-particularly beautiful compasses (I only have one right now.  It's always in my pocket.)

-stuff with birds on it

-old found egg shells

-abandoned nests from birds that won't return to them for the next mating season

-snake skins

-any other sort of beautiful and nice things (I have many buckeyes because I love them and old broken black walnuts, a mermaid's purse)

-dead bugs (i.e. intact bees, moths and butterflies, shells of scary big things)

Also, please let me know if you have any ideas of how to store or display these feathers!

Thanks for your help!