Great Turning

  • Gaping/agape/Gaia

    Lying on the beach that one moment, mouth agape, cheek and belly to sand, my skin seemed to fly away the way foam flies from water, the way a curtain parts in a gust. Where we touched, no obstacle separated the earth’s substance and my own: within both we breathed in a commons of space,…

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  • Buddhist Poetry Review, RIP

    Sad to see the Buddhist Poetry Review go dark. Here is one of my poems that had been published there. It’s Emily Johns’s favorite, which we often use in our Work That Reconnects workshops. Note, the text works much better on a tablet, or with a bigger screen’s window fairly narrow, for the formatting’s sake.…

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  • No life, no art

    no art, no life “[D]on’t tell me the otter plays to distract prey. Don’t tell me art is caused by evolution. Don’t tell me art anything.” So I say, and yet I go on to tell you things about art, and evolution. No worries, you make up your own mind. The poem “No life, no…

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  • Get yer fresh poems here

    The RavensPerch published three of my poems today. “No life, no art/no art, no life” takes a “yes, and…” approach to evolution: https://www.theravensperch.com/no-life-no-art-no-art-no-life-by-karina-lutz/ Then there’s a diptych, “Death to the escape fantasy,” with one part for my white friends who think they’ll just skip country when the going gets tough enough (“I. Whiteness is marked,…

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  • New kinds of weather

    ‘Thunder snow’ shocks softly with lavender lightning. Silence.……..  …Rumbling, muffling.….    ……Flashes from high in the low clouds curiously hard to distinguish from the arcing of transformers where wind strains wires from poles; but those light the blizzard from within with a pale version of new-maple-leaf-&-flower (lavender’s chartreuse)— ………………………………………..then all falls back to grey ……………….            and…

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  • My chapbook Silent Witnesses was a semifinalist in the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook competition. The winner was Awabi by Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Silent Witnesses is three long poems, or really, a poem sequence, a long poem, and a poem written in the form of ten poems. The “Barbed wire” sequence is a response to the work of…

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  • Mass Mourning

    Finally, we cracked. Poured out into the streets to mourn the measure of our losses, flooded houses of worship, in parks held candleless vigils: wicks couldn’t hold a flame through the driving tears. A man (he must have heard the news of this latest senselessness on the radio) opened the door to his car and…

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  • The Spring 2017 issue of Deep Times: A Journal of the Work That Reconnects is published. As in, open to the public. However, not all acts of resistance seek publicity. “Inside job” is one of those subtler disobediences. The issue is here. The poem is here.

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  • Sons of/and money

    Sure, I’ve never seen war, but I’m still bitter. My country is still bombing. My country that says I get to decide. I’ve never wanted to bomb countries I’ve never seen but hear are full of people. My country doesn’t want me to see their bodies or their anguish or even the beauty of their…

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  • Deep Times, Fall 2016

    The fall issue of Deep Times includes an essay, “Seeking the proper threshold,” along with tons of other goodies for people pursuing the Great Turning. http://journal.workthatreconnects.org/seeking-the-proper-threshold/

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