Barbara Schweitzer

Barbara Schweitzer, the author of 33 1/3: Soap Opera Sonnet (Little Pear Press), has twice been the recipient of Merit Fellowships from the RI State Council on the Arts for poetry. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily and on WRNI’s “This I Believe” program as well as in many literary journals and anthologies. Her plays have been staged in RI, MA, and ME. Her play Sub Zero is published in RI Writer’s Circle Anthology.

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► Barbara's Origami micro-chapbooks & selected poems are available below.

Origami Micro-chapbook	Selected Poem(s)
Heart-Shaped Rocks
	Heart-Shaped Rocks Nature loves to break down and remake edges rounding granite faces, curving shores, scalloping brittle sand and ice; ledges bow to ocean urges, fold themselves over in supplicant repose, sculpt caves of soft mouths to swallow the high seas. Eyes blink in direct sunlight – even your baby blues. Nothing craves a straight line. Even our gritty words circle in the zephyred air and carve curlicues around our feud. • Barbara Schweitzer © 2009
Barbara’s Itty Bitty Sonnet Collection 1
	Playing Hearts We kids cut our teeth on diamonds, our hearts on spades and clubs. Our first houses weren’t made with brick or straw but with a deck of cards. Jokers were wild, aces were high, we played for high stakes, as if our lives were on the line, and of course they were each time we shuffled the fifty two chances to fail or be blind to each other’s feelings or needs, to muffle kindness or care, to unlove each other, and we did it so well, we went on to higher feats like that, each with our own misnomer and sense of ourselves as queen, king, or joker, depending entirely on the luck of the draw, when we were born, and the jungle’s heartless law. • Barbara Schweitzer © 2009
Sonnet Collection 38 (+2)
	A Sonnet On Why I Write Sonnets One writes a sonnet in fifteen minutes to uncover what one might have in mind, not necessarily to beat Guinness Book of World Records, but rather to mine unknown fields of pleasure buried in silt of everydayness one lives with without thought to its harmful effect. Black lung’s sad ilk, cachectic thinking, ruins minds, is that not true? A sonnet addressed to you may leave one open to complaint. Someone might say rhyming words with “you” is downright lazy! Stu, blew, few, through, two, queues are easy prey. No matter. It’s great fishing in a mind, one’s own babbling brook bobbing fourteen lines. • Barbara Schweitzer © 2009