Fall 2010, Volume 9

Poetry by Mary Diane Hausman

I Step Out of Bed This Morning

I step out of bed this morning with
the light already bright through your shutters.
We say good morning.
You make coffee.
We sit at your backyard window—
spy doves and a white-throated sparrow
just learning to sing.
His plaintive whistle pierces our silence;
the flannel of your gown brushes
against my knee—

 

BIO: Mary Diane Hausman was born and raised in Texas Hill Country. Her work appears with Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Rita Dove in the anthology, Unsilenced: The Spirit of Women (Commune-a-Key Press), in her own poetry collection, A Born-Again Wife's First Lesbian Kiss and other poems (Relief Press), as well as in numerous other anthologies and literary journals, including: Hawaii Review, Spillway, Webster Review, Not Child's Play (Lunchbox Press, Inc.), Primavera, Inkwell, New Texas, My Lover Is A Woman and Pillow Talk (Ballantine Books and Alyson Books), The MacGuffin, The Texas Review, Out of the Dark (Queen of Swords Press), and Westview, DUCTS e-mag Brooklyn.

She has worked with Kate Millet at Muse Magic, Women Writers Reading in Manhattan, and has been a featured poet/author at the Westchester Music Conservatory and Bank Street Radio, New York, NY. Her essay, The Feeding (a comparison of vampirism and alcoholism), won first place in the Pennwriters' In Other Words Contest.

She teaches writing workshops at the University of Texas extension program, as well as poetry and writing in public workshops..