Another Salish Art card from the 2015 August Poetry Postcard Fest and one I’ve used before. We miss our cats, not that they would have been able to ward off attic rats. There is just something creepy about rats in the house and worse, in the attic. Like the feeling you’re going to prepare to decorate your Christmas tree, put the ladder up and have to wade through rat shit to get the plastic baby Jesus. Ugh.
And can you imagine going to the mailbox, delighted to get a card and it’s about attic rats? Sometimes I think I should think more about these things, then I think again and love the life of the wide bandwidth, even if it costs me a friend now and then. Remind me to tell you the one about the cannibal joke at the Audubon center.
Paul Nelson is founder of SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) in Seattle, the Cascadia Poetry Festival and the August POetry POstcard Fest (PoPo). www.POPO.cards. He has published a collection of essays, Organic Poetry & a serial poem re-enacting the history of Auburn, WA, A Time Before Slaughter (shortlisted for a 2010 Genius Award by The Stranger) and American Sentences, a book of 17 syllable poems drawn from the first fourteen of his 20 years of daily practice. The tenth anniversary edition of that book includes Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia. He’s interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Wanda Coleman, Anne Waldman, Sam Hamill, Robin Blaser, Nate Mackey, Eileen Myles, George Bowering, Diane di Prima, Brenda Hillman, George Stanley, Joanne Kyger & many Cascadia poets (see: https://paulenelson.com/americanprophets/) has presented his poetry and poetics in London, Brussels, Bothell, Cumberland, BC, Qinghai and Beijing, China, Lake Forest, Illinois, Ukiah, CA, and other places & writes an American Sentence every day. www.PaulENelson.com
