In the Lake of Your Bones
by Peggy Dobreer

Editors: Ricki Mandeville, Michael Miller

ISBN: 978-9839651-2-1

$15.00

“In the Lake of Your Bones is a poetry book that opens like a revelation. Peggy Dobreer blends memory, meditation, nature, sensuality, and takes us to the lucid territory between intuition and wisdom, desire and surrender. The language is at the same time enigmatic and transparent.  Dobreer writes: “This poem is for you. / You are the sanctuary of these words.” As readers, we have no escape; words and bones become of the same matter, we see ourselves in the inner lake of this luminous book.”  — Mariano Zaro

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peggy Dobreer came to poetry by way of dance and experimental theater. Her work appears in such journals as Malpais Review, San Pedro River Review, WordWrights Magazine and LA Yoga, and is widely anthologized. In 2005 she founded the now legendary Horse of Another Color series. Peggy lives in Los Angeles with her daughter.

Technique

A dancer walks down Mission Street

with a Marlboro in one hand and a

latte from La Boheme in the other.

She is a rainbow muffler around thorax,

warming calves, pumping smoke,

dragging deep into the celery snap of

another San Francisco morning, and

itching to pull on the day’s first leotard.

This is Mariposa, heart of the dance.

A cable car up Polk, bus across town,

stop at the café and half a mile hoofing

it into the warehouse district.

Industrial doors open to cement hallways,

open to studio spaces softened by

sprung wood floors. The smell of

kiln and oils, and the long push of

a cotton broom across caramel floors.

Always care of the floor comes first, as

breath falls to lower chakras, dissolves all

dissonance, light streams in through

southern exposure. Today, the spirit of

Erick Hawkins wields the broom. Footsteps

are a barely audible imprint on the ear,

so quiet you can hear your breath.