Donna Hilbert: Enormous Blue Umbrella
The poems in Donna Hilbert’s Enormous Blue Umbrella are drawn from the stuff of everyday
life in the world: seaside and woodland, supermarket and sidewalk. With the past and present
conversations with the living and the dead, Enormous Blue Umbrella is a primer for praising the
world, even in the face of heartbreak.
Shade
I’m looking for lipstick
the shade, exact match
of my mimi’s lips,
whose color never faded
from illness, from age.
At the end, still peach,
still full, still sweet
as summer fruit.
Donna Hilbert was born in Grandfield, Oklahoma near the Oklahoma-Texas border, but has
spent most of her life in Southern California. She is a graduate of California State University,
Long Beach, with a B.A. in Political Science, and from Phillips Graduate Institute, with an M.A.
in Marriage and Family Therapy. Her most books include Enormous Blue Umbrella, Moon Tide
Press, 2025, Threnody, Moon Tide Press, 2022, and Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot
Bach, 2018. She won the Staple First Edition writing award resulting in the publication in
England of the short story collection, Women who Make Money and the Men Who Love Them.
Her work is the subject of the short film Grief Becomes Me, by director Christine Fugate, which
was shown as a work-in-progress at the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and is included in
Grief Becomes Me: A Love Story, the documentary about her life and work. She writes and
teaches private workshops in Long Beach, California, where she makes her home.
Enormous Blue Umbrella is available from Moon Tide Press (PayPal Link)
Visit Donas’s Wiki page
Lana Hechtman Ayers: Still Life with Sorrow & Joy
As easily as water, that’s how I want to leave this earth writes Lana Hechtman Ayers, in this, her
stellar, fourteenth collection, Still Life with Sorrow & Joy. The poems curated here are, in part, a
feast of losses, but the work moves through several registers; I love that there’s also dark
comedy, imaginings of the afterlife, and most of all a fierce love for this world. Ayers knows
how imagination is part dream…dipperful by dipperful, how the sky is
a blue door
that opens both ways
. Over and over again, I came across lines that I wish I had written. Hard-earned
wisdom and a belief in wonder keep showing us, as readers, how to appreciate this life,
sawdust scattering around us like starlight, like meteor shower. This is a book you’ll want to hold close.
—Susan Rich, author of Blue Atlas
A Dream of Matzoh Ball Soup
My grandmother didn’t die of a stroke
when I was in college, no, no, no,
she rose up out of her wheelchair
& danced the hora with the nurses,
then came home to us & cooked
enough matzoh ball soup for an army
& forty years later, we’re still eating
that soup for supper, then raising hands
in the air in praise & later, after
she sings me to sleep with a Yiddish song
or two, I dream of her salt & pepper hair
blowing & glowing in April light,
her eyes squinting to raisins
but when I wake it’s always raining
& she’s not here, not anywhere
but in the photo on my desk
& all that soup we’ve been consuming
is the ever salty broth of sorrow.
Lana Hechtman Ayers is a former coffee-obsessive whose favorite color is the swirl of van
Gogh’s The Starry Night. She has shepherded over 150 poetry collections into print in her role
as managing editor for three small presses. Sky Over (Fernwood Press, 2026) is her most recent
chapbook and A Hole in the Night is forthcoming from Blue Light Press. She has poems
appearing in journals such as The London Reader, Peregrine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bluebird Word, One Art, Quill & Parchment,
and Exterminating Angel Press. She lives in Oregon with her
beloved husband and fur babies on the unceded lands of the Yaqo’n people. On clear, quiet
nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon.
Visit her online at LanaAyers.com
Sign up for Lana's free weekly favorite Poem After Poem Newsletter here: [link]
Buy Still Life with Sorrow & Joy from The Poetry Box.
C. W. Emerson, The Older American Poet
Website: https://theolderamericanpoet.com/
C.W. Emerson is author of the poetry collections Luminous Body, Glittering Ash (World Enough
Writers, 2026) and Danger Face, winner of Wayfarer Books’ 2024 Homebound Publications
Poetry Prize. He has received numerous international honors, including as winner of two prizes
from Poetry International: the C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize (2018) and co-winner of the 2023-24
Summer Chapbook competition. Emerson’s poetry and literary criticism have appeared in such
places as Harvard Review, Oxford University Press, Greensboro Review, Tupelo Quarterly and
others. He is the author of a chapbook, Off Coldwater Canyon (The Poetry Box, 2021) and the
prize-winning portfolio, The Thoracic Diaries, forthcoming from Poetry International.
