The Basil O' Flaherty
  • Home
  • Poetry
    • Michael Lee Johnson
    • J. MacBain-Stephens
  • Translations
    • Poems in Translation
  • 4-Legged Tails
    • Animal Poems
    • Animal Stories
    • Melody Breyer-Grell
  • Feminists' Voice
    • Feminists' Poems
    • Feminists' Interviews
  • Co-Authored Poetry
    • Collaborative Poems
  • Anthology
  • About
    • Career in Writing
    • About J.K. Shawhan, Founder & Editor
Literary Arts Website

Poetic Collaboration


First cherry blossom
this very moment
a good day
-Basho translation 

Wind carries the horizon
someplace else
-MS

Farming tumbleweeds
instead of something
useful
-IWS

The lone hitchhiker
I'd never stop for
-MS

Scream when I see you
thought I was alone
in the house
-IWS

Too hot on my tongue
I eat more chile
-MS

Cool jazz
spills out into
the sweltering street. 
-MS

Opening a window
cicadas sing us to sleep
-IWS

Lightening strike--
the whole neighborhood
blacked out 
-MS

Cozy in their den 
Skunks under the house
-IWS

Late at night
lamp’s red shade
illuminates my grudge
-MS

Hidden gods under my skirt
When I left home
-IWS

Sutra
wrapping paper, I tear
a bit
-MS

Floating in the mikvah
made me a woman
-IWS

Autumn
even it's syllables 
sound lonely
-MS

Can the trees hear
when leaves crunch underfoot
-IWS

Stillness
just the cat snoring
first snow
-MS

In the recurring dream
the house has even more rooms
-MS

A horned figure
in the dark outside
or just the fire? 
-IWS

Falling asleep, 
the pirate's ship unloads its treasure
-MS

Surprise in the box
the first egg
of spring 
-IWS

Writing in my journal, 
startle when offered coffee
-MS

Summer evening 
the sky is pink and blue
coyotes yip. 
-IWS

Rinsing the brush to add
colors of sunset
-MS

Sinking into a hot bath
the wind howls
against the window. 
-IWS

Punishing the wooden saint
turning his face to the wall
-MS

An old man stares
a blank piece of pine
across the years. 
-IWS

Praying in the car again
fuzzy dice dangle
-MS

Everything dies back
slowly falling to the ground
a walk in the park. 
-IWS

A child’s red mitte
left behind 
-MS

Silent snow
little footprints
lead away
-IWS

New Year's Day, craving
Japanese delicacies 
-MS

Seaweed
floats in the soup, more 
hungry patrons
-MS

Why does the desert
feel like the ocean? 
-IWS

Globe willows
greening up by 
the river rapids 
-MS

You don't return
another spring missed. 
-IWS
About Miriam Sagan & Isabel Winson-Sagan

​Miriam Sagan is a Santa Fe based writer, with over twenty five books. 

She has had writer’s residencies in the national parks, sculpture gardens, and in Iceland. These include Everglades National Park, Petrified Forest, Andrews Experimental Forest in the Cascades, and Gullkistan Residency for Creative People. She received a Lannan Foundation Marfa residency, and has been at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Colorado Art Ranch among numerous other places. She writes extensively about place and ecology, and essays and poems are collected in SEVEN PLACES IN AMERICA: A Poetic Sojourn. She does text installation, and was the co-curator of a show at Albuquerque’s 516 Gallery combining poetry and sculpture. Most recently, she installed a poem on sand on Miami’s South Beach as part of a residency at the Betsy Hotel’s Writer’s Room. Sagan has received a Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Poetry Gratitude Award. She holds a B.A. in English from Harvard University and an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University.

Isabel Winson-Sagan is the builder and manager of a Tiny House at Browncastle Ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she works in a family business consortium that includes solar energy and tourism. She has studied traditional European woodcarving with master Bulgarian carver Ivan Dimitrov for almost a decade. She is an art student at Santa Fe Community College and holds a B.A. with honors in Religious Studies/ Anthropology from the University of New Mexico. Her photography, suminagashi, and collages have appeared in several print and electronic magazines, including The Santa Fe Literary Review, Truck, and Rogue Agent. Her two books, in collaboration with poet Miriam Sagan, are the e-book “Swimming in Reykjavik” (The Moon Press) and the forthcoming “Spilled Ink” for which she did the typography and design. As part of this continuing mother/daughter collaboration, Winson-Sagan has been an artist in residence at Wildacres in North Carolina, at a printmaking residency at Herekeke Arts Center in New Mexico, and for a short term guest residency at SIM House in Iceland.


"We are a a creative mother/daughter team, Maternal Mitochondria. We are recently back from Japan, where we did a text, video and suminagashi (Japanese marbling) installation in an old grain silo at Kura Studio, Itoshima, Fukuoka. We share a studio in rural New Mexico outside of Santa Fe, and our studio practice is based on printing, collage, fabric arts, and poetry. Renga seemed a natural fit. Miriam learned it from Elizabeth Searle Lamb, known as the first lady of American haiku. Isabel can read Japanese, and takes the lead on translation. It is an old tradition to start with a haiku from a master, and this also let us avoid the debate of who would open. We are currently working on a renga-derived text which will be installed on a geo-cache pathway of recycled metal spirit houses for Santa Fe Skies RV Park and a crowd-sourced installation in Santa Fe's Railyard Park. Find us at: https://maternalmitochondria.com/"
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.