I am on of the winners of AIBA’s “I love Albuquerque” Contest. You had to say in 25 words or less why you love Albuquerque. I won the AIBA’s choice award – second only to grand prize winner.

Here’s my entry:

Albuquerque

Hot yet cool,
expansive yet intimate,
embracing it’s history
and hurtling towards the future,

open, accepting, welcoming

HOME!

A little cheesy, eh? Oh well, I did rather quickly at 2am one night – and really can’t believe it won. But I’ll take it – and the chocolate that is my prize!

I’m a poet and didn’t know it! (Sorry, I had to throw that in here)

So I recently read How the Dead Dream, by Lydia Millet. First piece of actual literature I’ve read in a while – and it was intense, sad, wistful, and ultimately satisfying. My awesome friend Sarah, started an online book club – and this is the first selection.  I’ve already posted my comments about it on her blog, so I won’t go into details here – but it spoke to me on several levels.  The other book I’m still reading is Poemcrazy by Susan Woolbridge – I’m actually rereading it – I love it so much and can open it to any page to get a little inspiration to get me through the day.

So here’s by piece inspired by both of these books.

little shell – do you see me?
does your soul feel my compassion,
can your husk hear me weeping,

the walls are covered with rusty tears
upon learning of your passing,
take care little shell
i bid you peace
-and dreams of ocean blue skies

This poor bird was tied to the bars of one of the cells at the old state pen – this was in the area where the really bad stuff in the riot went down – things I can barely stand to think about. It was already a spook-filled place – and this little creature’s death was more than I cared to see – but I did. His tether was rather long with lots of room to move about – I can imagine him flying back and forth – trying to break free.

So I got kidney stones again last Thursday.  Did this stop me from going to work – NO – I brought my trusty bottle of Oxycodone and went anyway – I’m seriously insane.  Too much to do and too little time to do it.  Friday Will fell on the way to school – smacked his head on the sidewalk kind of fell.  One

look at his scuffed up face and the goose egg flowering on his forehead and I decided he couldn’t go to school – so we dropped Katie off and hopped on a bus – his first bus trip. He was a trooper – probably would have been fine at school – but he’s my baby and he was bleeding so he stayed with me!

Friday night was spent at the Cow – where we had a fabulous opening reception for our Art of the Shrine show.  More on that later.

Saturday we went on our roadtrip and Sunday I worked at the Cow as usual – Sunday night I started filling seriously icky. Double-whammy! A cold and a UTI (something that seems to happen a lot with kidney stones) I have always gotten sick after having a KS attack – I think my body is just weakened and any old germ can come on in an wreak havoc on me. Monday – no work – today – no work – tomorrow I’m going back to work. I hate being sick!

Gearing up for our next show at the Wooden Cow (this Friday!) has totally drained me.  Saturday we had Will’s b-day party and Sunday I was at the gallery all day doing “the hang” as we in the art biz call it (or at least we at the Cow call it).  One of the things we strive for at the Cow is variety – and one of the ways we achieve that is by rearranging the entire gallery at the beginning of every month – this is a huge undertaking  – and we did almost all of it in about 10 hours – not bad. We have 40-50 artists in the gallery plus our theme show plus two “featured artists” and we just increased the size of our gallery space by opening up a space that’s been siting idle – I’ll take pics and share them later – it looks fabulous!  This week we have the opening on Friday and our awesome friend and neighbor is getting sworn onto the NM Court of Appeals – and we’re going to both – bus, busy, busy.

Will’s party was great too – we had a lot of fun and got to mingle our extended groups of friends and get them all together – I love that kind of stuff – and he had a blast which is the most important thing!