Monthly Archives: February 2025

More Local Odes

We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of when I wrote a poem every day in April to help raise money for Tupelo Press. I wrote about it here.

I’ve been slow about finishing the odes for some of the local businesses who were nice enough to host my poetry pop-up shop. It’s very much connected to how much interaction I got–on the days when people just kind of smiled nicely and didn’t stop to talk or donate or buy some coasters, I was able to write the ode while I was on site.

But several places people were super interested and talkative, and it was harder to get anything much written. That was good though!

But as always, it’s hard for me to avoid procrastinating. And then when I did sit down to write, I put all kinds of pressure on myself to write A REALLY GOOD ODE.

In any case, I’m getting them done. Here’s one I wrote for The Slowpoke Lounge in Spring Green.

Since it took me so long to finish it, I decided I should make a fabric collage/poetry frame (which was one of my giveaways for people who donated at a certain level last spring). I’d recently organized my fabric stash, so was very glad to find these pieces to use.

More of last spring’s odes and new ones coming soon.

Should I do it again this April? Have pop-up shops & write local odes as thanks for my hosts?

Saving Pennies

The penny will certainly live with the dodo
in the part of heaven reserved
for extinct things if I defend it.
I have a knack. I never vote
right in the primaries,
and Tommy Herr was traded to the Twins
the week after I got his Cardinals card.
Nonetheless, I can't quietly watch the penny
become the business of second hand shops
and children bored with monopoly money.

It has in its favor these things:
its name, the name of a girl or a lane;
its color, the sign of good plumbing;
its heft, just right for dead eyes;
its love of prime numbers, seventeen cents
and forty-one cents and seventy-three;
its president, symbol of my native Illinois,
a hard working man who would respect me
for saving my pennies and rolling them up
and spending the quarters I get in exchange
in Laundromats and newsstands only;
the only president to wear a bow tie
on his coin, the only one tall enough
to carry off a coin worth so little,
worth one more than nothing, worth saving.


[This poem is actually 25 years old or more. Relevant again.]