Forthcoming from Querencia Press
Author: l noelle mclaughlin
Ghostwriter for hire.
the pines
An exerpt from a story of mine from 2022:
When I walked there it was always in a circle, for it was laid out that way, like a ritual. The pines would get pushed around by the wind like the little lights atop ten thousand candles, and that is where I would bring my questions, I would bring my questions to the field and she would answer me, sometimes immediately, in lively conversation, sometimes slowly and over a season or so.
Continue reading “the pines”moon mind
sailor spinning in the sky of time. fall spin out.
surround surround (conjures snake)
the clawed one which has no face (spinal column)
the green reed given on the burnt ground glides away
pertaining to portals
new work forthcoming from The Sunlight Press
Moonstone Arts Center Reading
I’ve always been taken in by the beauty of other languages. I’m so charmed by accents and unfamiliar turns of phrase. In my twenties I would listen to recordings of Czechs speaking during my commute to the university and back, in an attempt to better navigate Prague when I would visit in the winters. (I should clarify the successful communication was mostly due to my multilingual friends who worked for the United Nations at the time, and not my very sincere and very flawed version of things…thank you Magdalena and Lucia!) But I was fascinated by the way the consonants all seemed to smash together, the way they could go on for some time before the introduction of a vowel (zmrzlina, for instance, is the word for ice cream).
When we were younger my sister and I rode the metro in Paris, our pronunciation better than our memories for the vocabulary we had learned back in school (“I think I just asked him how far is it to my foot…”.) Another one of my sisters sends me elegant little handwritten notes in Irish, a language as unfamiliar to me as the Japanese she is teaching her daughter to speak. I loved Southern Spain for the crossroads of different cultures, being so close to Morrocco. I stayed with freinds who had lived and worked in Palestine previously, Germany prior to that. I studied Italian during the lockdown, wishing I had learned it when my grandfather was still alive to speak it.
This Sunday February 26 I will be reading some poetry I have in the forthcoming anthology Love in the Original Language. If you’re unfamiliar with Fiona Bolger, you can read a little about her and her passion for languages in World Literature Today. I think that love is a language unto itself, and a very old one at that. Language learning is sparked by connections, and by listening, as is love.
 Sunday February 26, 2023 – 2pmVIRTUAL REGISTER @ https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwpfuiqqz8qGNPXE20VPIAeJq2jrFQlFQoj LOVE (in the Original Language)  Inspired by Fiona Bolger’s book Love in the Original Language–poems that inspire a love for the dignity of what is original and human – cross the borders of meaning, territory and flesh itself |
Flamenco, fire, and garden dieties
These are all some of my favorite inspirations, and also examples of some of the subject matter found in this issue of Advaitam Speaks Literary.
The landing page is my bio, please flip the page to read the two pieces I had featured here, as a couple of examples of my older work.
The auditory quality of my poetry is very important to me; I am guided more by sound than the sight or technical suggestion of particular words. When I set out to write a thing, it is largely a concerted listening that takes place.
Continue reading “Flamenco, fire, and garden dieties”point omega notes
p.19 the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that’s not the movies
p.21 the true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
p.22 these are the unsorted thoughts we have looking out the train window, small dull smears of meditative panic. the sun was burning down…
Continue reading “point omega notes”some songs
My latest writing contains inspiration from Silvia Federici’s contemporary work and Wace’s Roman de Rou, because in the twelfth century struggles against desperate gestures of control from the nobility and other old and corrupt institutions was also a thing. Doesn’t nature’s abundance and preserverance seem to mock these constructed narratives of our reliance on these crumbling institutions? As their systemic evil is further exposed, I find myself wondering is there more than just carelessness behind their direct assault on the natural world and her powers? Is this the one ally they know we need?
Working in a museum for years, I learned that the point of reciting, revising and revisiting history is to not lose the lessons our ancestors already learned the hard way. It is a concern for the present that keeps these old tomes and debates green.
l noelle mclaughlin 