So far in 2004, she was one of the judges for the All As One poetry contest sponsored by VSA arts and the Harwood Arts Center. She gave a poetry reading at Theater Works in Santa Fe with poet Jane Lipman and was a featured poet at the Mountain Air Poets and Writers Picnic. She had a reading her work at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe on April 12th, 2005. Her latest book contains pieces about altered states, grief and loss, food and communications with ghosts.

  • For more information, contact:
  • Mary McGinnis151
    H Calle Ojo Feliz
    Santa Fe, NM 87505
  • phone:
    505-982-1026

Dream-Seeing

  • People want to know
    the way my camera works;
  • (there are different cameras,
    different ways of seeing —)
  • different ways of looking,
    one where you strain
  • to see into shadows,
    staring until confused,
  • and one where you appear not to be looking —
    and the picture has a strange flower
  • outside the appropriate fence.
    In dreams my body is my camera
  • I'm where I am, it's kinesthetic,
    in the beginning the circles of confusion
  • are manageable
    the way the child's world is supposed to be
  • though a small aperture:
    the back steps, the anonymous square of bland lawn
  • above the flood plane.
  • But then I make my own colors
    bright and dark reds, blues and bluegreens.
  • Whether they are like your colors,
    I don't know.
  • And I bring in my own people:
    mother, father, therapist, lost lovers,
  • the ex-husband of a therapist, whoever I
    didn't know I was thinking about before I fell asleep.

© 2005 Mary McGinnis; all rights reserved