Quick Update

Received word this morning a recent poem of mine will appear in a future issue of The Write Room, an on-line publication. The poem is titled "Becoming the Wolf"—a short piece exploring the notion of lycantrophy, the process when a human shape-shifts to a wolven form. I twisted the medieval concept to a modern psychological level, exploring the notions of rejection and of failure, using the figure of an unnamed character.

The focal image arrived in my head one late, rainy afternoon while driving home from school—in my memory I recall we discussed the European Dark Ages—this could be a reinvention, a blurring of the event, but it suits the theme expressed in the poem. The element of a self-produced hairshirt exists in the opening stanza:

He wears his failures
as a hair-shirt— laced with layers of coarse
Tuscan boar bristles, the inner lining braided
with a series of Russian olive tree thorns
and strands of unwashed wool from a black ram.

Once the page is uploaded by the editors I will post a direct link to the full poem.