Born in Oklahoma, Marilyn Ringer now resides in northern California. She received a BA in Social Sciences and an MA in Experimental Psychology, both from Southern Methodist University. She has been a chef and restauranteur, a poet-teacher with California’s Poets in the Schools, and a teacher of adult creative writing workshops. During the summer, she spends extended time on Monhegan Island in Maine, where she writes with a group of women who are artists, teachers, Gestalt therapists, and gardeners as well as writers. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Drumvoices Revue, Eclipse, among others, and her chapbook Island Abaude (Finishing Line Press, 2012).
Alternative content
Exhausted by evolution
I wake in the dark aching and ancient.
The Earth turns herself inside out imperceptibly,
time-lapsed, the near oxygen burned by friction.
I learn to breathe it with all my organs, a prehistoric lizard,
a redundancy scrabbling in the loose shale
for scarce nutrients. Imagining song water, crushed green blades,
the sweetness of a drowsy bee.
I seek mutation and the shelter of a hollowed shape
in which to rest.