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A few months agao, laurasalas and I read and worked our way through Sage Cohen's book, Writing the Life Poetic with a little blog-to-blog book club we called, Write After Reading. The idea was that we read a lot of craft books but we don't often to the exercises. This way we read together shared the exercises that we did.

One of the chapters had an exercise about using someone else's title as the jumping off point for a poem of your own. The title I chose to write to was "How to Listen".

Here's my version.


How to Listen

Put down that stinky cigarette,
the one you promised to stop smoking.
Quit fiddling with the piano
and no, you don't need another drink.
You never need another drink.

Pretend if you have to ---
you're at work,
inspection time,
uniform neatly pressed,
just like all those lies you told me.

Eyes straight ahead.
Must. Not. Move.

Look at me, no, really look at me
in the eyes, those windows to my soul
you tried to crush.
I know I'm angry.
I want you to know it too.
I want you to hear what I'm saying
with my entire body.

I may not get this brave again.

Don't look down
or away with that
"you just kicked a puppy" expression on your face.
It doesn't work any more.

Focus on me,
the way you used to focus on me,
before vodka became your lover.

That pause between words
isn't an invitation for you to interrupt and tell me
how the world is against you.
I don't care.
Not anymore.

You don't have to listen long.
Just long enough
for me to say goodbye.


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.


The Poetry Friday Roundup is with Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference.

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Poem a Day #27

It is good to sit
and contemplate
the things you do
that are good.


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown.  All rights reserved.

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My month of play and this month of introspection has led to, well, a lot of introspection. I've also been working my way through my self-help and motivational books in the library. Rereading old favorites, culling books that no longer speak to me. I feel I'm in a better state of mind, happier in the here and now, than I have been in a long time, perhaps ever. But that doesn't mean I don't look back and wish I could undo some things, wish I could fix a lot of things I didn't do or I did in a way I wish I hadn't. One message comes through again and again, forgive yourself and move on. But boy, that forgiving oneself is a hard one, harder for me than learning how to be here now.

Three haiku today.


Poem a day #26

drawing the hard line
between making my amends
and making things worse

no one can tell me
if my choice is right or wrong
silence shouts at me

easily said but
looking to forgive myself
hard habit to learn

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown.  All rights reserved

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Poem a Day #25

I'm thinking about friendships lately
how some grow
and how others are outgrown
and I wonder
how do you outgrow
a friendship?

Does it just slowly unravel
when you pull on a loose thread?

Do buttons get pushed
until they pop off
at the most embarrassing times?

Does it begin to pinch
like an old pair of shoes
until you are rubbed raw
in tender places?

Or does it just fall apart
like a favorite shirt
washed one too many times?



© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown.  All rights reserved.

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I've spent the last few days going through 15 years worth of Horn Book Magazine, ripping out articles, quotes and mostly, artwork for a special collage project. The process has tossed me backward, to my early writer years when I wanted to do it all, write it all. The energy level I had back then was different, fueled mostly by manic moments.



Poem a Day #22

I used to be haunted
by voices of characters
begging me to tell their stories
making me ignore a lot of things
that shouldn't be ignored
in order to put words on the page.

Then it got silent
in my head.

In my heart
I worried
perhaps the lack of haunting
meant the characters had moved on to
someone else,
someone
who could give them the attention they deserved.

I hear differently now
not in such a rush
not in such a race
no need to trap the stories before they unravel.

I trust less and more
at the same time
I still listen to the voices
but I listen with my heart
instead of frantic fingertips
no longer worrying
about the silent spaces.



© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown.  All rights reserved.

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I can't remember where I read this but I've come across versions of it a couple of times in recent reading....the idea that memories we access more often are more likely to be corrupted than memories that are more pristine. (writerjenn , was it you that posted something about it?) As I continue to mine my past for a couple of current WIPs I have begun to wonder how corrupted some of my own memories may have become.



Poem a Day #21


I've been so sure of my  memories
until now
now when yesterday's hurt
runs into today's doubt
I wade into a sea of what-ifs

what if it didn't really happen
or not the way I've always told myself

what if the embrodiered edges of my memories
make it the same
but different
worse than reality
less than ideal

what if I have to let go of my righteous anger
and let the past collapse into the dust that birthed it

what if who I thought I was
is someone different
from who I am trying
to become?

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown.  All rights reserved.

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Looking for directions to get out of my own way.



Poem a Day #20

I think too much.

Instead of
letting words spill
across the page
letting words fall
out of order
letting words run
their own races
I think too much
and the ink
in my brain pen
dries up.

I want to channel my inner
Annie Lamott
and write those
crappy first drafts,
the kind where you can mix your tenses like a tossed salad
and place those damn modifiers anywhere you want
but I think too much
and my fingers freeze
like an old woman with arthritis
and the trapped words
grow like barnacles beneath my skin.

I wonder
if I am trying to protect myself
from the world
or maybe it is the world
that needs protecting
from all I might say
if only I wouldn't think
so damn much.


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown.  All rights reserved.

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Sometimes it's not a matter of learning what you need to know but understanding that you just need to be who you already are.


Poem a Day #19

There was a girl
who didn't know a lot of things
but she knew how to feel
big feelings
and how to let the ink
spill across the page
showing the world how much
she didn't know
and in the spilling
of ink her wisdom
grew.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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Behind again. A haiku from yesterday.



monkey flower blooms
beside the unfurling fern
can you hear me laugh?



© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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Allergies slowed me down yesterday so I didn't get this posted.


Poem a Day #16

I find it hard to take things
on faith alone.
I want proof that slowing down
being in the moment
is worth the investment of my time.

Today I follow the dog
down the garden path that ends
near the glider
where she sniffs the sage.

One ceanothus, still in bloom,
calls dozens and dozens of
bees to dance between
the blue blossoms.

Fat bumblebees
fuzzy carpenter bees
industrious honey bees
and bees that look like flies.

I stand still
let bees buzz all around me
and listen to the concert
I almost missed.


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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I am horrible about falling into the "compare" trap when talking about progress on a project. If I've written 100 words, someone else has done 500. If I manage 1,000, someone else has done a chapter. It's discouraging to me so I find that I have to pull away from reading a lot of what my friends are doing. This is even worse when I am working in verse because word counts and chapter counts, well, they don't count up the same. So I am trying to celebrate a poem a day. More is good. More is great. But more doesn't always happen and that's okay.


Poem a Day #15

one well-written poem
(no chapters, word or page counts)
a productive day


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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I am learning to be comfortable in my silence which in turn, is helping me understand how much I have to say that is worth saying.


Poem a Day #11

Sometimes,
on those days when the voices in my head
are louder than the voices on the page,
silence scares me.

Sometimes,
when I listen not only to the space between the words
but to space that echoes from words left unspoken,
silence understands me.

Sometimes,
when I remember that saying nothing at all
can be as powerful as shouting at the top of your voice,
silence comforts me.


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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This poem is late to the table because there is some serious thinking going on in my brain. I'm looking for the off switch. Time to stop thinking quite so much.

Poem a Day #10

I've read just about every kind
of "how to do it" book you can read
when it comes to writing,
even if I can't remember who said what.

I think I've absorbed a lot over the years.

How to write mostly boils down to
write what you know or write
what you want to know,
just pick one and get to work.

The how to write isn't as hard as
the making yourself sit down and do it.
The world will keep on spinning
even if you never write another word.
Really.

You really just need one thing to write,
you need to want it bad.

It's the wanting that makes it so.
It's the wanting that makes it real.
It the wanting that fuels the doing.

What I forget is that wanting isn't a thinking thing,
it's a heart thing.
Wanting to write isn't based on any logic,
it is born from the need to connect,
one writer, one story, one word
a bridge,
from heart to heart.


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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I found that last year, writing the poems about the father I never knew took a tremendous amount of energy, creative and emotional, energy from me. It was draining. It was inspiring. And at the end, it was healing. I am a talked who never really gets to talk enough. So this pondering out loud is my way of talking and trying to use up all that energy until I don't need it for this anymore and I can move on to something else.


Poem a Day #9

I read once that if you have a hole in your story
you should point to it, over and over again,
the idea being that if you pointed enough times,
it would disappear and cease to be a hole.

So when people ask me why it is I can't seem
to quit talking about things or move on past things,
at the speed they think I should be moving on,
well, I just tell them I'm pointing to the hole,
hoping it will fill itself up by the time I'm done talking


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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Today has been more pondering about my struggle to write or struggling to not write or struggling to not care what other people think about what I want to write. Just some rough haiku as I try to move through the muddled part of my brain.

falling on deaf ears
my words, pulled from my soul, yes,
my heart breaks again

my heart breaks again
stories stagnate within me
this is what I fear

this is what I fear
doubt wins too many battles
words unwritten wait

words unwritten wait
happily ever after
more than just a dream

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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Is it a poem because it rhymes
(Seussian or otherwise)
or perhaps because the lines fall to expected feet,
scanned to please the ear?

Is it a poem because of the hours I spent to find just the right word
to craft just the right sentence
to show you how the green gold of the hummingbird's chest
was the exact color of my great grandmother's brooch?

Or is it a poem
just because
I say
it is a poem?


© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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For the month of March I gave myself permission to not write and to try and learn how to play (mostly with art.) My hope was that I could find a way to reconnect with my lost writer self. Now that the month of play is over I am trying to distill what I have learned on my journey in my poem-a-day project for National Poetry Month.


I know many people say, and they are right to do so, that the joy is in the process of writing, not in the sale. But truth be told, once you've made a sale or two or three, it's hard to focus on process instead of product. At least for me.



Before I'd ever heard of query letters or a synopsis
or even dared imagine the possibility
of signing with a New York agent,
I used to sit on the stoop of cement in my garage
and write exactly the kind of stories
I liked to read.

I didn't have a market guide
or a critique group
and SCBWI was just a bunch of
mixed up letters from the alphabet.

Before I ever sold a single book
I didn't wonder how many copies it would sell
or when I would earn back my advance
or whether the reviewers would be kind
if they decided to review it at all.

The Internet was still a dream
to be unfurled
so there were no worries about
blogs or websites or social media status updates.

I wrote because it made me happy
to imagine the child I used to be
in the stories I told myself.
I wrote because figuring out what happened next
was more fun than a crossword puzzle
or learning how to knit.
and I wrote because when I didn't write,
I was (according to my kids) grumpy
until I once again picked up a pad and pen.

I don't want to go back in time
or undo what I've done over the years
but I want to find a way to remember what it felt like
to sit on that cement stoop scribbling on that green steno pad
plotting stories for no one but myself.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

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For the month of March I gave myself permission to not write and to try and learn how to play (mostly with art.) My hope was that I could find a way to reconnect with my lost writer self. Now that the month of play is over I am trying to distill what I have learned on my journey in my poem-a-day project for National Poetry Month.

I've always been one of those writers who said they "heard voices" and didn't see pictures. I could tell you how my characters felt but not what they looked like. Even my dreams were primarily auditory and not visual.

During my month of play I gave myself the same sleep intention every night, "What stories should I tell?" I didn't even mention a character's name because I didn't want to influence my subconscious. For a few weeks I had no response. None in my dreams and none in one of those moments of inspiration that come when you least except it. I just kept on doing what I was already doing. I couldn't say that I trusted the process, I just hadn't invested anything emotionally in a particular outcome.

After a few weeks of practicing mixing colors and playing with various texture techniques, I was surprised to find myself thinking in pictures and not words. Now considering my fears around not writing and wondering if I would ever write again, this might have made me even more afraid that my silence was permanent and not just a passing pause. But instead I found it invigorating. Laying in bed, waiting to fall asleep and I would wonder what would happen if added a glaze of burnt sienna or dripped some India ink across the half-finished collage that waited on my desk. I saw myself grabbing a handful of colorful papers and gluing them willy-nilly and watching a sunset explode in front of me.

Making art was changing the way my brain worked.

A pair of haiku for today.



Scheherazade
paints tales only I can hear
when I close my eyes



silence sits with me
I am unafraid. Art sings,
colors hold my hand



Kidlitosphere Central has the master list of all the poetic events going on this month.

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For the month of March I gave myself permission to not write and to try and learn how to play (mostly with art.) My hope was that I could find a way to reconnect with my lost writer self. Now that the month of play is over I am trying to distell what I have learned on my journey in my poem-a-day project for National Poetry Month.

I'm so used to feeling guilty about something (everything?) that I wasn't quite sure how to approach a month of play. Since I have fallen in love with collage and art journaling I decided to devote March to art. I had signed up for a couple of online classes over a year ago and finally got around to trying the first lessons. I watched video after video on YouTube. I read art blogs. I was ready to dive in. Except.

Except that I soon discovered artists have to deal with some of the very same things writers have to deal with - such as the blank page.


I had a stash of blank books (much to beautiful to write in or use for art but I had them, that was the main thing, right?) and I pulled one out and stared at the blank pages. I was just as blocked on the art side as I was on the writing side. Back to reading blogs and watching videos and going back through my notes from class. One message came through - if you don't know what to do, slap some paint on the page. You can come back and do something pretty with it later. So I resolved that every time Cassie rang the bells to go outside (my art desk is across from her patio door) I would sit down and slap some paint, any color I grabbed, onto the page. I'd worry about what I'd do to the pages later. The 10 minutes Cassie spent outside was just enough to get the paint down and then let her back in the door.

I remember my painting teacher telling me that she had painted 40 backgrounds in her art journal before she painted one she actually liked. Just like with writing (or anything) the more we do it, the better we get at it but it had been so long since I had been a beginner at anything. I hadn't even begun to think about second and third layers of paint. I couldn't believe how hard it was for me to do something so simple, just cover a page in a single color. 



The brush feels awkward in my fingers,
like one of those too fat pencils
we had to use in kindergarten,
and I wish I could call back that child
I used to be to hold my hand.

With spastic jerks, I push paint across the page.
I cannot count the times I drop the brush, landing
blobs of paint on the desk, my jeans, my shirt
and more than once, my chin.

The teacher makes it look so easy,
the way her brush waltzes across the page,
she spins paint into corners, pulls it back to the center,
long strokes, short strokes and then, in no time she is done,
and damn it all, she is still smiling.

Purple. Red. Yellow. Pink. Just paint
Two pages, five, eleven.
Blue. Green. Turquoise. (Hey, I mixed that.)
Don't think. Don't count. Just paint.

Over one hundred pages later
I hold my most favorite brush,
gently move paint across the page
and realize, I have finally learned to dance.

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

This is one of the four art journals I prepped during the month of March. All those juicy pages waiting for me add to them.


Kidlitosphere Central has the master list of all the poetic events going on this month.

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It's Poetry Friday! First off I'd like to point you to This week's Poetry Push poems where readers have shared their poetic response to a Poetry Push prompt for a list poem. I've decided to point to the original link for Poetry Friday, rather than repost the poems here because that way people can respond to any of the individual poems that might speak to them.

I started to panic when I realized that it was Poetry Friday because I've been flat out on the couch with the flu all week with my husband stuck taking care of me and the dog and the house and still going to work each day. So with Valentine's Day around the corner, and the knowledge that I have one the best husband's ever, I decided to write a love poem for him.



IT'S EASY FOR HIM

It's easy for him to say I love you
on the good days,
days when I've decluttered the house,
caught up on the laundry and
finally changed the sheets on the bed.

It's easy for him to say I love you
on the pretty days,
when I dress up just a little,
days I let mascara wake up my tired eyes
and my clean hair falls to my waist
like strands of sunshine.

It's easy to love
when life is beautiful.
Not so easy
(or so I thought)
to say I love you on the down days,
the not feeling like myself and
I'm getting sick days.

But he notices something about me
and asks are you okay?
I shake my head no and he holds my hair
away from my face,
and I lean over the bucket
while my stomach rebels.

I camp on the couch and
he brings me clear liquids
and soda crackers
and makes sure the remote control and the phone
are close at hand when he has to leave.

He comes home carrying every comfort food
he can remember I've ever mentioned,
alternates his day between letting me nap
and bringing me more foods
to tempt my lack of appetite.

He keeps the house running quietly in the background
while I do battle with the flu,
rubs my back,
tucks the comforter up under my chin,
blows me a kiss good night,
and oh, all the ways he tells me
he loves me
the good days and the bad days
he loves me
it's so easy for him.


Susan Taylor Brown
All Rights Reserved

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I am working on my verse novel inspired by the poems I wrote about my father during National Poetry Month and while the book will be told from the POV of the two girls, I am trying to see the main characters through the eyes of other family members and doing some character building through poetry.

Here is a new original poem from the point of view of one of the mothers in the book.


Seeing you, I see me
(your crooked mouth, your green eyes)
and him
(your long fingers, your black hair)
and it scares me so much
(you have no idea)
to remember that time
I so want to forget.

Hearing you, I hear me
(when you sing)
and him
(when you lose your temper)
and it makes me
(God help me)
want to tape your mouth shut
so I won’t ever
hear his voice again.

I know you don’t understand
why I tell you I can’t remember
but the truth is
I already remember too much
(the lies, the cheating)
and I think
If I let myself remember it all
(no! no! no!)
all of it
it would finish what he tried to do
himself
and kill me.

Just because I gave birth to you
doesn’t mean I have to tell you everything
or anything about him
at all.



@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
    All Rights Reserved


Picture Book of the Day has the  full round-up of all the Poetry Friday posts.

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And now, the rest of the story, or more specifically, how poetry, Google, and Craigslist helped me find the family I never knew I had.

In November of last year I wrote about finding my father's obituary. It was an odd feeling to find him but to not be able to talk to him. Thanks to the Internet and Google I was able to use some of the information in the obituary to get a pretty good idea of where my aunts were living but I didn't do anything with the information. They were old and I was scared. How do you suddenly drop into someone's life and announce yourself as a relative? What if they yelled at me? So I decided to do nothing. I'm good at that.

Along came National Poetry Month and I had the idea to explore my relationship with my father through poetry so that I could finally make peace with it all and then move on. After I had posted the first few poems I was contacted by Diane Main, a local teacher, who had read my poems and been moved by my story. And it turned out that this teacher had a passion for something of her own, genealogical research. She offered to see what she could track down about my father's family.

In no time at all she located my father's half-sister living only an hour away from. She had been given up for adoption by my grandmother but had the opportunity to correspond with her mother/my grandmother, before my grandmother's death. I sent my aunt a link to some pictures I had of my parents wedding and in the set was a picture of me as a toddler taken in front of the Christmas tree at the car dealership where my mother worked. My aunt recognized the car dealership because she had grown up her entire life living right next door to the owner! My mother, when asked, remembered my aunt's parents but had no idea that their adopted daughter was related to me.

You can read more of Diane's side of her research for me here.

Each night while I worked on my poems Diane worked on my family tree. She found one Webb after another. My aunts and uncles. My great grandparents. Suddenly I was surrounded by Webbs. But most of her research went backwards, toward the older and mostly dead Webbs.

That's when I thought of those names and cities and states I read in my father's obituary. And I finally felt brave enough to try and make contact. Thanks to Google, I found the phone number for both of my aunts. I called the one that I knew my mom had met. And yes, my heart was pounding, wondering what I was going to say. I ended up just blurting out, "My name is Susan and I'm Tommy's daughter."

It was a wonderful conversation. She'd had some health issues so her memory wasn't as great as I had hoped for back when my mom and her brother were married but she never once doubted me and she told me so many stories about my father's childhood, stories that helped me make sense out of the type of person he had become. When she ran out of stories about my father I asked her about her mother, my grandmother.

She paused and then said, "Well, she loved to write poetry."

That was when I burst into tears. There is no one on my mother's side of the family that has any inclination toward writing at all so this small piece of information touched me to the core.

The next day I was still feeling pretty brave so I called my aunt Kitty, the one mentioned in this poem. And again I was greeted with open arms. She was able to tell me even more about my grandmother and she stopped every so often to call out the name of another relative. The following day I called my father's widow Ruth and she was able to fill in a few more pieces, but not muc

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Here we are, at the end of National Poetry month and this is my last poem in the series about my father. I wasn't quite sure what would happen to me during this month but I knew that I would be changed by the experience because that's what writing does, it changes you. What I was hoping for was to find a way to finally heal, after all these years, and let go of any of the anger and frustration I have had at the man who was my father only in the biological sense. I'm tired of carrying all that hurt around. It's a heavy load and it slows me down. I've tried to let go of it all before and never had much luck but this time, things were different. I could tell that right from the start.

I'm going to pause right now to tell you this is a longish post but I'm also going to ask you to keep on reading. I think you'll be glad you did so when you get to the end. (Actually I will break it into two parts because it's a long story.)

These have all been first draft poems written late at night after I've forced myself to sit still and quietly revisit those old hurts. I don't have a lot of memories so as the month went on, it got a little more difficult to mine the past for new poems but somehow, every night, something bubbled up that needed remembering so it could be put to rest. I didn't revise the poems or sit on them overnight so often, in the morning, there were mistakes in grammar, bad line breaks, even a few facts I got wrong - all stuff that needed fixing. Normally the idea that I've been posting poems with mistakes in them would make me cringe but this time, I was okay with it because in the writing of every poem I've been feeling myself heal. There's a scar, there always will be, but I no longer feel defined by the fact that I grew up without a father. I am who I am because of the things I've done in my life, the choices I've made, and while I am far from perfect, I'm pretty happy with how I turned out.

For all of you who read and posted comments and sent me emails offering support on this emotional journey, I thank you. I could feel you all holding me up when I was trying so hard not to fall apart. And for those of you who read but didn't comment, I could feel you there too. Really.

So here's my final poem of the series with an afterward worthy of an after-school special movie.

FAMILY STORIES

I grew up a lonely, only child in a
neighborhood of other people's grandparents.

Imaginary friends kept me company in my attic bedroom
except for those few weeks during summer vacation
when grandkids came to visit
up and down the street.

What I wanted as much
or maybe even more than a father
was a sense of family,
of feeling like I belonged,
a chance to find myself
in the faces of my family.

My mom and I
were the only Webbs I ever knew
and I felt the absence of that family
nearly every day.
It didn't seem to matter to me
if they were good or bad
what mattered
was that they were someplace
that I wasn't and for the longest time
I translated that in my mind
to mean that I was less than everyone else.

I learned to tell stories by watching television
and rewriting the endings of my favorite shows
when I was supposed to be asleep.
I'd hide under the covers
and rearrange the scenes in my head
so the star of the show had to search for someone,
a missing daughter
a missing sister
a missing someone,
who always
turned out to be me.

All I ever wanted
was to write a

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WHAT YOU MISSED KNOWING ABOUT ME

I like meat and potatoes
better than fruits and vegetables
and I can't stand it
when the juice from the green beans
runs into my mashed potatoes.
I used to take a paper napkin
and roll it into long, skinny tubes
that I could use to separate my food

Books were always my best friend
and I could navigate our entire house
while reading
and never run into anything.

One summer I hammered nails
into the apricot tree,
hoping it would die
so no one would ever make me try to eat one again.

School came easy for me
and teachers liked me
because I always did my homework
and volunteered to answer
even when no one else would raise their hand.

Even though I was short
I ran the hurdles on the track team
and I ran fast.

I got booed
when I tried out
for chorus
and the school play
and the fashion show.

Dance lessons and piano recitals
were okay
but what I loved most was
roller skating and horses.
I was good at skating
and not so great at riding horses.

I've been afraid to go to sleep all my life.

When you add it all up
I was just an ordinary kid
but I was your ordinary kid,
and that's
who you missed
knowing.


@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
    All Rights Reserved

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ALONE AGAIN

In the day time
he worked at a gas station fixing cars and pumping gas
but in the evenings
he got cleaned up and left my mom
home alone
so he could go out dancing with other women.

How good he
was at hurting
both of us
by not being there.

I don't know what the final straw was
for her, the ice cubes or the angel food cake,
(not my stories to tell)
but one day while I was still growing in her belly
she said enough
and moved out, back to the safe cocoon of her parents home
across the street from his mother's house.

I wonder if he ever came to see his mother
and maybe glanced across the street
where his soon-to-be ex-wife lived,
with me still growing in her belly, waiting to be born
and thought about coming to see her,
trying to fix what was broken between them.

Probably not.



@copyright Susan Taylor Brown 2010
    All Rights Reserved

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