Everything Writers Need | Writers of Kern
Christie (Cummings) Finley grew up in Bakersfield where she graduated from Bakersfield High School and Bakersfield College. At UCLA, she studied Germanic languages and literature and earned the Master of Arts degree in 1973. That same year, she began teaching German at Santa Monica College and continued teaching there for 30 years. She also did work for various Los Angeles law firms. She is retired and lives with her husband in Sherman Oaks, California.
God is So Good,
Even in small ways.
He truly Loves us
All our days.
See how simply
He shows His Care,
Even by providing
Socks to wear!
In my travels
I thought I’d brought
Enough clothing,
But I had not.
So I realized
I’d probably
Have to wear socks
That were smelly!
Until I opened
The suitcase that
My cousins gave me
Which belonged to their Dad.
They’d planned to give it
To a thrift store,
But I needed to pack
Quite a bit more.
I opened the luggage
And what did I see?
A pair of black socks.
I smiled happily
Because the thin socks
I’d brought to wear
In boots were bagged
With dirty underwear!
God always knows
Exactly what we need.
He works in mysterious
Ways, indeed.
That’s one reason
I give God the Glory.
His Love’s for all, forever.
And that is my story.
Named after poet Percy Shelley, nature inspires Shelley’s poetry. Several of her poems appear in chapbooks and anthologies, and her debut book was published in 2020. Shelley is a wife, mother of 3 grown girls, dog mom, legal secretary, Newsletter Editor for WOK, and member of Parkside Church. Rhyming is breathing to Shelley.
Written for International Day of Peace (September 21, 2021) video of the Peace Initiative, Bakersfield College
Portia Choi published a chapbook of her poems Sungsook, Korean War Poems. At Writers of Kern meetings, Choi met Helen Shanley and MaryLou Romagno who became good friends and mentors. Choi hosts First Friday Open Mic and publicizes National Poetry Month in April. She administers www.kernpoetry.com. Email at portia@kernpoetry.com
under stirring gnarled twinkling lights, the little room, the little poems, under goddamn bushes and adobe trailers, what’s desire or need or silence, a gut’s un-flitting storm? Look, I flinch when the wind comes. Listen to friction, it is treacherous, a platform leveling the mind, wooden and shapeshifting with each experience. A horror movie with multiple endings. I lock the doors. Hide upstairs. I listen to every creak, watch a shadow display its crooked skeleton, towering over my guise, it whispers to me: you let it crack you open, you want it to pill // pull everything out of you. one hard slice, one furious pop, and you’re nourishing the greediest parts you hid: sickle tongue, engine teeth. What climbs out is the beast, the torrent of antlers, sawdust, and fur, blood next, sure, always blood, guilty blood, undeniable blood, loud blood, pooling at the feet of the captor and the conspirator, that lives inside the hole you dug up to resurrect, they feast on all the dead bad parts of yourself you buried. Now look, goddamn, the newness, the old, the past, the future, right now, all scratching at once to get a glimpse of the mess, to witness the creature and its evolution, stretching alive and glowing, my god, the pulse.
Mateo Perez Lara is a queer, non-binary, Latinx poet from California. They received their M.F.A. in Poetry as part of the first cohort to graduate from Randolph College’s Creative Writing Program. They are an editor for Block Chronicles and a Communications Specialist for Nectar Digital Collaborative. They have a chapbook, Glitter Gods, published with Thirty West Publishing House. Their poems have been published in EOAGH, The Maine Review, and elsewhere.
Your Poem on the Writers of Kern Blog
April is National Poetry Month if you’d like to include a poem in our blog for that month, please send an original poem. Established poets, emerging poets, and would-be poets all have the possibility of being published during the month. At the end of the month, all the poems published in our blog will be compiled into an online ezine and available to read and embed on your site for free.
Please send your poems to submissions@writersofkern.com
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