O.R. Gami
O.R. Gami can be seen wandering wooded paths and fields in search of the perfect Origami. She claims to be friends with Jan Keough but this cannot be confirmed.
► O.R. Gami's micro-chapbooks and selected poems are available below.
Poets
Most recent poets. Select "Pick a Poet" for entire list.
Audrey Friedman
Audrey Friedman's work appears in numerous journals including the California Quarterly, The Newport Review, The Black Buzzard Review, The Comstock Review, Diner, and Heartbeats III: Jewish Writers at Their Best from Targum Press.
Audrey's chapbook, "Gallery of the Surreal," is available from Premier Poets Press, Middletown, RI.
► Audrey's micro-chapbook and selected poem are available below.
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Origami Book |
Poem Titles |
Acknowledgements:
Sifting, and At the Mime and Mask Theater have appeared in Contemporary Haibun Online. It’s Dark in Here has appeared in the print anthology, Contemporary Haibun, Volume 10 by Red Moon Press.
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{mooblock=Feng Shui}
The cobalt Limoges vase is gaudy with gold
roses. I am trying to de-clutter, but for every thing I toss, I put three others aside "to consider." The silk scarf still holds her Estee Lauder fragrance. The Persian lamb coat with black mink collar is dated, way too big for me, and so heavy it’s a burden. Silver serving platters are scratched and tarnished; the plating is barely there. bitterweeds defy banishment I weep each Spring
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Audrey Friedman © 2009
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Mary Ann Mayer
The birch in the photo fell in wind-driven snow on the first day of Spring, but Mary Ann is alive & well. Mary Ann’s chapbook Salt & Altitudes was published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. She’s also the author of Telephone Man, setting her dad’s trade tales into free verse—(dedicated to he who taught her to climb trees, but more importantly, how to climb back down). (Telephone Man available thru Amazon here.)
Mary Ann is drawn to the pastoral tradition & its illusion of idyll. She also writes from her love of homo ludens (playful human), believing poesis is play, and play, beauty. She’s drawn to the (seriously playful) ethos of The Origami Poems Project and enjoys making and distributing micro-chapbooks. She volunteers with the arts-outreach group, Ocean State Poets, bringing poetry to marginalized communities.
Her poems appear widely in literary journals, most recently in the anthology Missing Providence (Frequency Writers). Awards include Boston’s Grub Street poetry prize, Tupelo Press and River Styx finalist, and honorable mention in Bauhan Publishing’s May Sarton Book Contest.
Mary Ann’s proudest poetry moment came when her German translation of Leonard Nathan’s poem, “From The Mountain” was installed in the Avalanche Museum in Galtür, Austria—a museum inside an avalanche wall surrounding the village where thirty-eight people died in 1999.
A retired occupational therapist and avid mountaineer, Mary Ann lives with her husband Pete and dog Ezra Hound in southeastern Massachusetts and the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
► Mary Ann's microchaps & selected poems are available below. Download & Print by clicking the title.
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Origami Microchap |
Selected Poem(s) |
| IVORY in Connecticut | |
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Cover Design by Carl Peter Mayer
Images from the Web •
“Through 1954, Connecticut was the largest importer of tusks anywhere in the world. One adult African elephant tusk of 75 lbs., properly milled, could yield the wafer-thin ivory veneers to cover the keys of 45 pianos.” (CT history.org)
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Opening Lines Start with middle C
and play it back thru time, thru
the juke, the clap, the hand, the cry back through a century of sheet music, cannons, Yankee Doodle, ragtime in living rooms— the middle-class pastime, before radio and gramophones and talkies… Play it down, down, through cakewalks and marches, Burning mobs, “coon songs”, lynchings, “whites only” and whites in blackface performing… •
Mary Ann Mayer © 2015
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Cover image from the Web
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Nocturne It’s the way the street corners whisper
and the tail lights answer as the tall girl, the one with the habit, slips into the alley and doors shut before winter lets the cold in •
Mary Ann Mayer © 2013
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Cover Image of Kestrel from the Web
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April Kestrel I dive into air.
A kestrel soars alongside. The day is all mother-of-pearl and ripples. Why do I feel so for this bird, his curve ball world of vaster space and intimate gravity? I’m just a body unlearning itself, one leap, weightless— and the axis of the world tips her wings. • Mary Ann Mayer © 2012
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Cover Image from the Web
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Dedicated to the
Forever Young Band,
RI's Neil Young tribute band
Slater Park, September 2010
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Opening Lines It’s always a country fair after sunset,
the lights of rides turning on one- by-one, twinkling in harmony with a watermelon sky spilling sugar-pink juice into clouds jet, gold, silver-lined. It’s shooting-stars, still hurricane time,
approaching autumn, a fork in the road. Couples rise in the sky on the turning wheel, others tilt-and-whirl through calliope music. Under the tent the band plays. All Neil Young.
Some drift away. She wants to stay and dance. He wants to slip between the parked cars, down to the river, lay in golden-rod blaze… •
by Girl Friday aka
Mary Ann Mayer © 2011
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 Book created to
support the work of RI Pet Rescue
See our 'Random Acts of Poetry' page
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Thanks, Mary Ann Mayer, for
inspiring this collection
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Crumb Count The old bird dog stands her ground
before the cupboard, toenails gripping, stick legs splayed out over scratched linoleum. She lowers her muzzle, the color of lumpy Oreos in milk, to nuzzle for droppings from Mother Hubbard’s treats. Though never gentle with cookies, she’d always been tidy. Now she leaves half behind. She’s an old girl I can’t count her years exactly, but I can count the crumbs. •
Mary Ann Mayer © 2010
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 Dedication:
To my father, Bob Maitland, whose stories these are.
Cover design by Carl Peter Mayer
Painting by Bruce Mitchell •
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Wiring Point Judith I was loaned to the line gang Mary Ann Mayer © 2005 / OPP 2010
- Excerpted from Telephone Man
Mary Ann Mayer © 2005 Purchase thru Amazon here
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 Sculpture and cover photo
by Carl Peter Mayer •
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Sister Fish Sisters and fish, my friend
kerplunks, her arms stretched to ten and two, and floats in her sea soup, under her, green, giggly waves, and over her blue-kissed sky. This is the purpose of time (between fish and sisters): going to the beach and the beach going home with us. Salt in our caruncles, salt rust in the soap dish, sand in the soap. A throttling wave, a good pumice, a good slumber under a feather boa of stars. All night long, waves break and break under the cliff, under the floorboards, and still we pick out a melody against the roar. • Mary Ann Mayer © 2010
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Hunger Moon sounds like a proverb or song
I once heard about how people should be in love
most of the time, grateful for ways the body
responds in moon light, native
or amplified • Mary Ann Mayer © 2010
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Erica Knowles
Erica Knowles wrote, "Erica is a student at URI, and has been writing her whole life. She keeps a blog (barely) and too many journals. After ten years in Atlanta, Georgia, she has recently returned to her native home of Rhode Island. She also enjoys drawing and painting, as well as singing and playing her mini piano."
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2/17/2012: The Origami Poems Project expresses great sadness over the passing of our friend, Erica Knowles, who died in a car accident just after midnight, Wednesday, February 15th in So Kingstown, RI. Erica, 23, was a Junior at URI. We knew her best as a poet. Erica would email us out of the blue with a collection of poems that just fell together as an Origami book. Always cryptic but enthusiastic with her emails, she let her poetry sing out and beyond the page. Oh, and yes, she would always send a photo that perfectly completed the cover.
We are grateful to have Erica's poetry available - Thank you, Erica.
* 2014 February Anniversary Tribute edition, Travel Light, is published below. Thank you again to Erica and to her loving family.
As of her birthday on 11-24-2019, there have been over 22,000 hits on her webpage.
►Erica's microchaps & selected poems are available below.
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Origami Microchaps |
Selected Poem(s) |
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Click on title to download PDF microchap.
Cover Photo selected by
Ashley Knowles
Erica’s 1st Typewriter • |
Travel light You will learn what it is you want along the way. You can't start a journey with a pack filled to the brim of things that you "might" need. Leave room for the things you will learn and come to love. Leave room for the things that you will discover and the things that will define you. Leave room and leave the rest, it will only confuse you and drown you in clutter, muddling your thoughts and your vision of yourself, blocking your best path. Your best self. Be in a state of constant motion, a state of doing and bettering. Never stop learning. Never stop pushing forward. If you can do this than I truly have no doubt that your answers will become obvious and reveal themselves. But first you have to let go of everything you don't need and don't know.
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Erica Knowles © Facebook,
May 18, 2011
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March 11, 2011 God or Whoever Dear God or Whoever, • October 8, 2011 Surfer's Path
I'm folding up
The Surfer's Path t-shirt
That came in the mail,
That you never wore,
But I know if you were still here
You would have.
I lay it out on my bed,
So when I get home
After this long night
It will remind me of how
As a child, you would let me pick out
One of your t-shirts to wear to bed.
And with the hemline below my knees,
You would tuck me in,
And if you were still here
I know you still would
If only I had ever asked.
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Click on above title to download PDF microchap.
 Photo chosen by her sister, Ashley Knowles
We knew Erica best as a fellow poet.
She would email us out of the blue sending us a collection of poems that would magically fall together to form the perfect Origami book. It was difficult to choose just five poems
for this collection.
We hope you will love them. - OPP editors
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Wild Desire Careful, careful
Is what one must be With fire. And so the same with Wild desire. •
Tracing hearts
If you stand at the door
Erica Knowles © 2011
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Angel Stern
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Click itle to download PDF microchap.
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Note from the Author I think grief
tends to be something that makes the whole world a big empty lonely space. It knocks the wind out of you, leaves you wordless and unable to function normally. It makes you forget who you are without it. •
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Miles & I. Miles dances with me • I am the notes played |
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Click title to download PDF microchap.
 Cover design by Erica Knowles
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The Repetition of Sound
• Words If I could marry
The pen and the paper I would. Let words be my savior. I only wish they could Love me back, Instead of just saying they do. • Good Company
It’s true, Erica Knowles © 2011
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The Wild
• Off the Map
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Click title to download PDF microchap.
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On The Run I know if I remain immobile,
This melancholy dust will settle Fine and light over my living skin, Making it forget the sun, And the rain, And all the things in the world. My muse is on the run. •
Erica Knowles © 2011
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Shadow puppets
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Click title to download PDF microchap.
 Cover photo by Ben Nelson
Poems written for my father.
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What I'll give you I really want
To give you Something good Because you gave me My life And then the world. But all I have Are these few words And a love too big To ever be Described by them •
Faith
If there is • Lullaby Safety is
Erica Knowles © 2011
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What you gave me
• Undeniable
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Click title to download PDF microchap
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 Poems for learning to stand
on your own two feet
and inspired by the beautiful
and sometimes devastating
honesty of life. - EK
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Tracing Hearts If you stand at the door
At just her height, Breathe on the glass. You will find there The outline of a heart She has traced Innumerable times. A promise: You are never alone. •
Erica Knowles © 2011
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Click title to download PDF microchap.
 Cover photo by Erica Knowles
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Ghost Someone's hand upon my face,
Fingers laced into my hair. A silent promise, A calming presence, You are not alone. I exhale And fog up the car window. A word written there I had forgotten. Inscribed a thousand years ago. But the lonesome mystery remains: Whose fingerprints are these? A ghost’s. These words on my windows are Promises that died long ago. And like the silver vapor of my breath My calm slips away Leaving me alone. •
Erica Knowles © 2010
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Click title to download PDF microchap.
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Advice I wish heartbreak was brief
But it never is. A good heartbreak is like a good love. Important. So remember, Never dye your hair when you're upset. Resist the temptation to text. Never look back, you can't go back. Burn bridges. If they are necessary, you'll rebuild them. Wear a seat belt when driving Under the influence of heartbreak. And when you really let go Be sure the only one bear witness is a radio. And only let them see you bleed once. Just so they know you're human. Don't panic love, Everything is going to be wonderful. • Erica Knowles © 2010
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Click title to download PDF microchap.
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Angel Stern Spun in from the universe
The world aglow, Not a thing to my name Save for a smile
With no reason or rationality.
I pass the time, Grabbing at ropes of light, Climbing to higher elevations. Encircled by pinpricks of color, We are chaos at its finest. Polaris winks from the center
Of the night sky Daring me to think of a wish. Morning light creeps quietly And as the night begins to fade I reach up and slip the Guide star into my pocket
So I am never lost. • Erica Knowles © 2010
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To Become Undone
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Click title to download PDF microchap.
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More I would like to be more than a spare key
Or a half remembered dream. The faceless nameless woman, The do-er of his laundry Forever searching for love In the pockets of his jeans. I want to be more than the wrong flavor Of coffee or vitamin water. More than the wrong song By the right artist. More than underappreciated. More than background noise, The comforting sounds of morning. • Erica Knowles © 2010
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Click title to download PDF microchap.
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She She examined each thing,
Strange and slightly transparent, With wide-eyed curiosity Amazed she'd carried such Treasures inside her All along. And she realized with Astonishment, She didn't know herself At all. • Erica Knowles © 2010
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