Estelle Ana Baca

Category: Poetry

Works that employ figurative language, metrical patterns and words that rhyme.

  • 20/20

    Ultimately, the goal is to get something done, if only to put down something after a life-rrrreally-got-in-the-way hiatus.

    10-line, 11-syllable terza rima, here:

    20/20.

    You are more than this gradual expansion,
    more than the taut lengthening of the tendons,
    or shifts in the centers of gravitation.

    All systems are preoccupied with functions
    in constructing your channels, your inner sparks,
    synthesis of tissues, each in cohesion.

    Quickening in the blood, of sinewed bulwarks
    detecting your subtle movements in rapport
    with stippling sensations and bright and bowed arcs,

    you’re a celebration I’ve always hoped for.

    ♥ & damn glad to be back,
    EAB

  • Frayed Knots

    I really really really really really had to put something down on a page today. It’s an 11 x 17 in a stupendously early draft form, but it dissolved some of the cobwebs in my brain, making this post altogether worth it. ♥ EAB

    Fear

    From the tiny, perhaps trivial – wasp wings
    and spidery spites – to the monolithic,
    maybe the mundane – losing one’s liberty
    and everlasting loneliness – they become
    crystalline within, although colorless and
    oftentimes odorless, stacking one reason
    for failure on top of another like a
    losing hand of playing cards. They are the sharp
    somethings that can’t be seen or touched and yet are
    cradled in the folds of the brain, molecules
    that glide over the membranes in the way that
    sunlight slides over the synaptic windows
    of the skyline at dawn. Glass reinterprets
    the light for the sheltered: it’s never as bright
    as it is – heaven and hell always exist
    beyond silicate structures – for perception
    is never the reality, isn’t it?

  • Rebirth of the Spool + Need(lework)

    Since my lifepace switch got stuck in turbo mode a while back, it’s been harder than differential calculus to find the time to sort out the transfer of my web host and domains to a new one that doesn’t get hacked every thirty seconds. A couple of weeks ago, however, I had no choice but to sort it all out, so after a few months of being down, this site is finally back up, running with a new template in place to spool out new work. Huzzah!

    I miss writing. I miss traversing the bioluminescent pathways of plotting, I miss the willowy decision trees of redrafting, and I miss employing the eagle-eyed and steady-handed scalpel work of editing. (How soon is November?)

    In the meantime, here’s a sevenlingish thing I needed to wring out of my fingertips, just so I can say I’ve written something this week.

    Need(lework)
    Twist the splinter and hold it
    up to the light: you will see
    the osteological
    anomaly, the gap where
    the genetics disagreed,
    leaving a tidy hole for
    a whetted wick of thread.

    ♥ EAB

  • (cue elevator music) + Stippling

    (I’m blogging out of Tumblr while I  s l o o o o o o w l y  sort out the mess with my webhost after this hacking nightmare. Thanks for hanging like a stalactite! Mwah!)

    While walking my pooch this morning, I had a shoulder-tapping hankering for writing some poetry. I haven’t jotted down any in a while—definitely not since I made the decision to release Virtues & Occultations in serial form—and I remembered that while in redrafting/editing mode, I need regular doses of stimulus to keep the creative wheels greased. Therefore, I challenged myself to knock out a seven-by-seven in seventeen minutes about seventeen minutes ago. Here’s what I got:

    Stippling

    Distances are defined by
    monochromatic shades: white
    space, where light is not absorbed,
    is where disconnects occur.
    So I propose that we live
    inside the darkest spots, where
    all the colors congregate.

    I feel much better now! Thanks!

    Book 2 of Ministers of Grace goes on here. Book 1 is still 99¢ on Amazon. And I will continue to blather here.

    ♥ EAB

  • charismatic simulacra + #MoG1 Update

    I’ve admittedly been a few different classifications of AWOL. Among current events, this site was hacked, and fortunately I’ve managed to get it back to about 95% running capacity. Nevertheless, I assure you that I have been popping various materials—mineral and vegetable—into my cauldron in preparation for an announcement about Book 2 that I will deliver next Tuesday, April the 8th.

    Nevertheless, I’m pleased to impart to you fine folks that a price reduction has been applied to Book 1 in the Ministers of Grace series, Cherubim & Seraphim. All ebooks are now priced at a wallet-friendly 99¢, so there’s really no excuse for you not to partake. Further to this, physical copies of the book are now available for $9.99. Visit the page for Book 1 for details on where to purchase your copy today, if you haven’t already.

    How can you say no to that?

    In the meantime, have a wafer of a poem, something I threw together over the last couple of months that I’d forgotten about. ♥ EAB

    charismatic simulacra

    Under a microscope, small things
    acquire enormity—
    sometimes in both contexts—but if
    you don’t

    believe me, I invite you to
    examine the stern, coarse
    expression of a flea, or a
    fissure

    in steel—a perfect fractal of
    the Grand Canyon—where you
    might find stampedes of seahorses
    (only

    here, I might add, nowhere else would
    promote surrealism
    quite like this), or, if immersed in
    a clear

    glass of water, a solution becomes
    a snowstorm, where as it
    is Above, so it is Below,
    beneath

    the horizons of our flattest
    perceptions, where you find
    the world’s reversions slip on slick
    logic.

  • The Musician

    It’s January, and that it means it’s time to get back to work! I’m pleased to report that the redrafting of Book 2 of Ministers of Grace is well underway, and yesterday, I was such a beast that I plowed through 500 words of a chapter, churned out four haikus in twelve minutes (1, 2, 3 and 4) and threw down an 8 x 5.

    Lookie here

    The Musician

    He shook his head, from flats and blues
    to sharps and golds, whenever his
    hands sketched out another chord, as
    if to say, “Mama, you sure this
    isn’t the stuff magic’s made of?”

    Happy 2014, everybody!!! ♥ EAB

  • Chromatic Aberration

    Sometimes I can really sink into the quiet that the road provides. This—four 4 x 10s with rhymes in lines 2 and 4—is the result of two flights across the US that I endured on Tuesday. ♥ EAB

    Chromatic Aberration

    Exposure: light slips beneath the surface
    of everything, turning out the colors
    inside the molecular code—red is
    never secluded in the dark harbors

    of oxidized iron, except when it’s
    punctuated with copper, or brilliant
    points of silver, or the scaffolding that’s
    carbon as an operating quotient.

    Sunlight bleeds only through smoky filters;
    moonlight hemorrhages twice annually,
    with annular eclipses as consorts
    until the norm returns eventually.

    But as all things shift state, and as all things’
    binding rings decay into lighter worth
    and being, shades and hues source from the same
    pulses of starlight that loom over the earth.

  • Falling First – some verse! – & #MoG iBooks format

    Just a quick note: Cherubim & Seraphim is now available in the iBookstore. All electronic formats—Kindle, Nook or iPad—are going for $2.99.

    As it was snowing here in NYC last night, I felt it was time to knock out a quick little ditty about it. Here’s an early draft… it’s one long sentence, 7×11.

    Falling First
    Initially, they avoid congregating,
    yet sometimes they form twisting kaleidoscopes
    of white butterflies that shun the mere notion
    of angles of repose, but when they settle,
    they invite the angels of rest to hold down
    the hours, so that all places, capitals to
    hamlets, slip beneath winter’s slow temperament.

    ♥ EAB

  • Haikus & Update

    Requiescat in pace: my hard drive died a painful death on October 27, 2013, aka Hellaween, after I’d tried to install OSX Mavericks. It was a sad, sad day, esp. as my life of late hadn’t permitted any manner of document backup since July 26th. I lost a fair amount of work, but I’ve been able to find consolation in the wisdom of the great Vonnegut.

    As a result, I’ve had a hard time getting the chance to work on the e-release of Ministers of Grace in additional formats. I’m hoping to get it up and running on the iBooks store soon, and I’d like for it to be available in other formats as well.

    My writing gears are getting rusty, so I decided to work on a number of haikus yesterday courtesy of the prompts provided by #haikuwordgame on Twitter. I was able to come up with a few of them based on those that were suggested over the last month or so, and here are some of the fruits of that labor.

    honor destroy feeling
    “Alchemist”
    Swear, on your honor,
    that you won’t be feeling the
    need to destroy gold.

    chimney voluntary thirteen
    Thirteen chimneys all
    voluntarily chose to
    burn their bricked selves up.

    goose graceful grimace This ended up being a tanka.
    The transition from
    gosling to goose is rarely
    graceful, mostly it’s
    a grimacing go, getting
    to gander at the good life.

    show curve manipulate
    Show me where the curve—
    manipulation of time—
    comes ‘round this here place.

    torch cricket age
    His dying torch made
    cricketing sounds as it
    aged into ember.

    deep blue welkin
    ‘Welkin’ is a damn
    awful word to describe the
    deep blue bliss of sky.

    wave god airplane
    An airplane adrift
    on a wave in the air can
    make folks pray to god.

    It might seem silly to post a smattering of haikus, but I find that working within the structure that is a haiku—something that finite as well as syllabically and rhythmically regular—forces you to adapt your language. My innate preference is always for prose, so my haikus tend to result in a single 17-syllable sentence like that alliteration? that avoids but doesn’t prohibit fragmentation, but it’s nevertheless a good exercise if you’re feeling rusty and in need of greasing the wheels for 20 minutes.

    Peace out, and watch this space for when I can offer you the holiday treat hopefully? of ebooks available everywhere.

    ♥ EAB

    PS—If you have read Book 1 of Ministers of Grace, please leave me a review on Amazon, Goodreads or Shelfari!

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