That Fall in 1996 When You Dined With Divas

I had fun with this prose poem. Based on real life experiences, it took on a life of its own once I put it into the second person and strung them all together. Note the connective tissue of sushi throughout. So 1990s! Bloodtree Literature is this gorgeous new publication. I'm delighted to have this work in their second edition. Enjoy. 

Book Review of Victoria Chang's Barbie Chang for The Adroit Journal →

I wrote this brief book review for The Adroit Journal's 2017 best books section. I had heard Victoria Chang read from Barbie Chang and was quite taken with her writing, her voice as this alter ego. I have been writing in an alter ego lately (more to come on that soon). Victoria Chang is so adept and clever at weaving her life into her alter ego's voice. Enjoy the review and get the book!

Shore Leave

Shore Leave

            Dr. William N. Stone, Boston Harbor, 1869

He could diagnose the particular illness

from across the docks by the way a sailor

walked off the ship and down the gangway. 

Rickets: the scrawny bow-legged one.

Scabies: the short sailor, bag shouldered,

free-hand scratching vigorously.

TB: the mick’s hunched, stalling cough.

Another hobbled by gangrene’s deathly creep.

He’d ready the lotions, medicines,

scalpels, suture needles, bandages, whiskey.

Ready for bile-filled bellies, bones badly

broken then badly set. Mites and lice,

scurvy’s blackening bruises, bloody

toothless mouths, wreaked livers,

weakened lungs, busted noses, cauliflower

ears, the ooze of puss from open wounds.

Steady stream. They’d queue outside. First stop

before pubs, whores, dinner, a bath,

while they still had cash in hand.

He’d ask them in to his room, seat

each sailor on the table. Quick check

then set to work, probe, mend, amputate,

medicate, bandage, eradicate.

Their breath stinking of rum and rot.

Their talk of storms, endless seas, loss.

Some arrived wearing death’s ragged coat,

he’d refuse their pay. Peer, pry, then lie,

ply with more whisky and send off with a pat.

Heidi Seaborn

This poem initially was about pirates. I then started researching the history of ship and shore doctors during the great sailing ship era. That learning took me to redraft this poem in this form and to epigraph it to a doctor I discovered along the way. It appeared in the 2017 edition of Freshwater Literary Journal.

Off Alki

"Off Alki" is a short poem that emerged from the longer poem "But How Could We Forget?" and was written as a submission to the Seattle Poetry on the Buses contest. It was chosen and on April 24th, I read it at the launch party and saw it posted on a bus. The poem will travel all over Seattle for a year. I hope it makes people think and smile at some point in their day. You can see the poems at PoetryonBuses.

Thanksgiving 2015

            “Best wishes from our family to yours.”

                                                -Hallmark

Brutal: derived from a king slayer, warlord, philanderer,

who turned coat, turned his back, turned on

the trusting hearts hung near his own.

My sister’s brute sharpened heart, a weapon to drive

deep between the ribs of the man she once loved.

Not behind closed doors, a quiet killing.

No, a spectacle worthy of the Romans.

As our family gathered to give thanks for another year

of living, of loving, of one another.

Birth gave us front row seats in the Coliseum,

to watch a man bloodied by the ravages

of thirty years of unspoken stories.

I am the Hiritus of this moment, chronicling

what remains as Caesar shops for a new home

and the garden goes untended.

~Heidi Seaborn

Thanks to Gold Man Review for printing this poem in their Fall 2016 issue. 

What We Hold On To

Dungeness Spit, Washington

The road gathers the fields, harvesting them with each turn.

A barn with silver silos crests the green horizon.

The houses, whose gardens snap sunflowers, rhubarb,

lettuce and stunted corn are the dream

we each harbor in the folded wing of our palm.

We stem from forest trail to the beach,

skid the sand between our toes,

feel the smooth circles of stone beneath our feet.

This spit is the crooked finger calling the ocean home,

the arm holding our family together.

We sleep on the driftwood,

eat cheese and sausage on Russian rye,

search for agates like four-leaf clovers.

The wind is not enough to unbalance the cranes from their post,

not enough to push us further down the spit to the lighthouse.

~Heidi Seaborn

This poem was written eons ago. I held onto for decades and then it felt right to send it to the Washington State Poet Laureate's call for poems. It memorializes a special moment before our family scattered one by one off to adulthood.

WA129 is available on Amazon and bookstores throughout the state and supports the arts.

Nightview, New York 1932

    Inspired by the Berenice Abbot photograph

Here it is: a cozy of gems stitched down your sleeve.

Blood pulsing

hot against your temple.

You hold the lights like children in your gaze.

The tempo of traffic.

Inhale the shoe polish deep in the subway.

Shoulder the cold as if it’s a woman you can’t leave.

Heidi Seaborn

Impressions on W. H. Auden

I wrote this poem eons ago, when I was a teenager. I reworked only slightly and it was published by Ekphrastic Review.  Having read a great deal of Auden again recently, I feel like this impression of him remains with me. 

Separation and In Memoriam

Fredericksburg Literary and Arts Review published two more of my poems in the Fall 2016 issue.  "In Memoriam" was written during that productive stay in Winthrop after a walk along the Chewuch River Valley. I wrote "Separation" for one of my sisters as a response to her becoming separated and the how disorienting that experience can be.