In each paper cell 

emptiness

gray light chambered

symmetry that astounded

The firs breathed overhead

As a girl I’d overheard stories

of sting and nest

how I could take weightlessness

in my hands and understand a swarm

that had abandoned

harm that could be done

wings and vanished wing. . .

Underfoot    crunch and collision

cone   boot   dried leaf

a sheen of ice

above   clouds like snow-swayed tents

from Sting and Nest, (Sunstone Press, 2011)

Barbara Rockman teaches poetry at Santa Fe Community College and in private workshops in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is Workshop Coordinator for Wingspan Poetry Project bringing poetry to victims of domestic violence.

Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies and have received three Pushcart Prize Nominations, the New Mexico Discovery Award, The MacGuffin Poets Hunt Prize, Southwest Poetry Prize, and the Baskerville Publisher’s Prize. She is editor of the anthology, “Women Becoming Poems,” and author of “Sting and Nest,” which received the National Press Women Book Prize and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. A new collection is forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press. She has collaborated with artists on numerous image and word installations and has been awarded residency fellowships to PLAYA and Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Barbara received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and her M.Ed. from Antioch University-New England.