tree in snow, OLP
photo by Mary Stebbins

Pomme de Terre

Sautéed with zucchinis, potatoes, mushrooms and peppers, the  calves’ livers I made for lunch are too hot to eat.  Hot with Detroit Jerk Spices.  "Detroit" to remind me of you, deep in the motor city.  Immersed in motors, no doubt.  The other ingredients are a framework and excuse to eat potatoes.  Apples of the earth, crisp and wet.  Not sweet and tart, but tasting of moist dirt. Of soil. Soil infuses the mushrooms, too.  Like the ones we found growing along the trail at Sleeping Bear Dunes.  And brought back to camp to eat.  You were excited to be living off the land.  We cooked them on the punky wood the locals sold us.  Your annoyance at finding the wood half-rotted changed to pleasure when you discovered its rubble glowing in the dark around the chopping block—your first foxfire.  An inadvertent transaction in magic, a turnabout. You hung a chunk of light in the tent.  Outside. it stormed.  Lightning erased the foxfire with its brilliance, but the foxfire persisted.  Glowed.  Two lights alternated all night, pale green, bright white.  Your face appeared and disappeared, the way it does in life. So much earth between us.  Eclipsing our time together.  I wipe the heat of jerk spices from my lips and imagine the foxfire of yours.  Hot. On mine.

Mary Stebbins, for Keith Taitt

Available 

(click on photo to see larger)

I'd like to invite you to attend the opening of my Photography Exhibition Friday, November 18, 2005 from 6-8 PM at the Wescott Community Center (at the corner of Wescott and Euclid in Syracuse, second floor).  There will be a poetry reading celebrating art from 7:15 to 7:45 PM.  Refreshments will be served.  I hope you can come!  If you can't make the opening but would like to see the show, the regular hours are 9-5 but they are also open many nights.  Mary

view some of my images at IMAGIK


Welcome to my Personal 'Zine

This is my personal 'Zine or Journal.  I invite you to visit and dialogue with me.  The poems, prose and photographs on these pages are all by me, Mary Stebbins, unless otherwise noted.  The links to where they are (or were) published, as well as contact information to reach me, are located on the left sidebar. More poems, prose and pictures will be added regularly.


I like happy happy joy joy as much as the next person, but this is not a "happy-happy-joy-joy" site.  The work on these pages explores subjects sometimes joyous and sometimes difficult and "ugly," subjects that make up life, the yin and the yang.  What is.  I warn you now so that if you are looking for happy happy joy joy you might choose to look elsewhere.  Otherwise, please join me in a dialogue on life in its many hues.  Welcome.

Please visit my journal and sign my guest book.
The site is still underconstruction, a slow process for me.  Do visit again.  Mary Stebbins

Here is a link to a poem by Patrick Lawler with me in it, about halfway down:  http://www.slope.org/21%20poetry%20lawler.html

Edge of Glass

 
My mother bites the thin edge of fine blown glass,
crunches fragments in her teeth and swallows them.

Cool, smooth and delicate. Like dangerous ribbon candy.
She is a small, thin child, sepia-skinned, dark

hollow eyes with reflections of long-dead faces.
She scuffs her knees roller-skating, metal skates

on bumpy sidewalks from home to Grandmother's.
Yesterday, a match fell into the wastebasket.

The kitchen went up in flames.
She turns a Tootsie-Roll in her mouth as she skates,

chocolate honey-syrup darkens her tongue.
Sometimes, there is a large, strange bow at her throat

or perched on her head. Her dress is polka-dotted, gingham,
flowered, devoid of color,

Other times, the skate key bangs on a cord.
No one seems to notice as she grows smaller

and smaller. Fades. Wrinkles around the edges.
Tonight, she turns another glass in her teeth.

Half a house burns from her dreams.
Tomorrow, she may disappear entirely.

 
Mary Stebbins

for Margaret
This poem was published in the 2003 Women Artists Datebook, see link on sidebar for further info.

To view another of my poems published in the Women Artists Datebook, click here:  http://nopolar.blogspot.com/

or better yet, here it is:

Not Jenny but Geraldine (This in reference to the Not Jennies)

Morphing, or How I Become Geraldine

Buffarilla, you say, fat slob, Twinkie grubber. You point
at Geraldine, who picks flowers in the yard next door. Call her
retarded, crazy. Her eyes bulge, you add, and she's missing
teeth. She's human, I respond, has feelings, like we do.
You point out other women, as we drive toward the gym.
The ugly ones, the stupid ones. The ones with buck teeth.
The acned, bow-legged and knock-kneed ones. I cradle
their feelings, and mine. Every word slaps the face of my own
imperfections. Roaring past a truck with a sign: Wide Load,
you point at me, laughing. By the time we arrive, I'm so fat,
crazy and stupid I can't get out. I'm wedged in the seat,
and only the jaws of life can save me.

Mary Stebbins
for Chuck
this poem was published in the 2003 Women Artists Datebook

 

 

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