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Zinta's Interests
General
Art in all its forms, in all mediums. Painting with words. Wilderness and its preservation. Spiritual journeys. Wanderlust. Alaska. Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Jazz, especially strings, especially a double bass, and classical music. Women's issues. Mushrooms in butter. Smooth stones that fit in the palm of my hand. Getting lost in old bookstores. Hands that know how to touch and hold. Prayers, answered and unanswered. Grace. Old books. Leather journals. Violets. Learning how to 'let go, let God.' Watching my children's lives unfold. Freshly sharpened pencils. Questions. Smelly soaps. Sputtering candles. Blizzards that keep me in for days, hidden from the world. Annie Dillard. Ladybugs. Wet clay. Spiderwebs pearled with dew. Unlocking rusty gates. Bag of plain potato chips I do not have to share. The very first sentence. The period after the very last sentence.
Books
1. Shadow Mountain : A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild by Renee Askins
2. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
3. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Vintage) by Rainer Maria Rilke
4. The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre : A Novel by Dominic Smith
5. Three by Annie Dillard : The Writing Life, An American Childhood, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
6. The Innamorati by Midori Snyder
7. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
8. Smoke by Dorianne Laux
9. A Woman's Path: Women's Best Spiritual Travel Writing by Lucy McCauley
10. True Notebooks by Mark Salzman
11. Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill
12. Grace for the Moment by Max Lucado
13. Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back by Norah Vincent
14. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
15. Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life by Bret Lott
16. Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion by Diane Osbon (editor)
17. Possession by A.S. Byatt
18. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
19. Rowing to Alaska: And Other True Stories by Wayne McLennan
20. Being Caribou: Five Months On Foot With An Arctic Herd by Karsten Heuer
21. Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage
22. Marcus Aurelius: The Dialogues by Alan Stedall
23. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis
Heroes
The Flux of Days
by Zinta Aistars
We swelter in sirocco breezes,
simmering in a feverish summer sun.
Golden fields of doing nothing. Nothing.
But breathing. Deep. Slow.
Infused with salted air and watching
the spit and spume of surf throwing
her lacy white skirts to the sky: dance with me.
Languorous, so that our bodies rise and rock
into each other’s bones, rib cages meshing,
skin melding, tucked inside and around,
limbs intertwined and synchronized.
Tango the summer across the dance floor,
salsa a storm into the sky,
sultry and unrelenting,
until it surrenders,
until the sky grows leaden with anticipation
of the fall.
His mind was like a Scrabble hand without vowels: confusion like molasses, sticking together thoughts like tiles, a glop of senseless sounds. This. Never. Happens. Champ of the wordy arts, he was Wordsmith Extraordinaire, and she, well, she wasn’t half-bad. While one hand fingered and moved the tiles on their rack, arranging and rearranging, the other plucked at the tip of her long braid, snaking across her shoulder. He could almost see the letters forming into words of syllabic potency in her fine mind.
Dare he admit his competitive nature? So much of his life spent in a cubicle, not unlike these rows of squares, only the walls rising up around him and keeping in his creative whims. Monday through Friday, slave to the Company, the Boss with his whip: produce, Wordsmith, produce!
And he did. Relentlessly, dependably, efficiently, and with an excellence that never went unpunished. Finished with one task, there were always three more. Wordsmith the Wordslave, daily flogged into service of the senseless imbroglio.
But this board of words built upon words was his domain. Here he ruled, and here, there was order. This board of even squares appealed to his mildly obsessive-compulsive nature. The beige of the tiles did not confront or offend. The pink of the scoring squares was as soothing as the color of Pepto-Bismol for the cramps of the addled brain. His words crossed and intersected and so logically grew and multiplied one from the other.
There was even something subtly sensual about it. How the tiles kissed. And produced their offspring. Yes. He was a Word God. Had never lost. Not once in… years. Perhaps never, because at this molasses moment, he could not remember such an atrocity happening. Not to him.
She placed them in orderly progression:
P-A-R-A-D-I-G-M.
Triple word score.
Heartbroken, he looked at her across the table, and was in love.
Salvo From Treetops
by Zinta Aistars
To look out across the jag and clean cut of mountains,
to be wrapped in the damp cool of vapors and mists,
to be spiked through with treetops, impaled on sky,
heart swinging high and loose against clouds:
Earth blood surges through human veins.
We are the mud and dust of long ago myths,
legends unfolding, carrying
and being carried, bred and breeding,
birthed and birthing the infinite cycles
of a universe without end or beginning,
a story told from the middle and spiraling outward
for time without measure—
waking as She awakens,
sighing when She sighs,
rejoicing when She rejoices,
bleeding Her blood,
dying as She dies,
a silence imploding upon itself,
the mountain inside crumbling to sand,
to dust, to nothing, to less than
nothing, that very moment
when our prayer is said without one palm to soil,
one palm to sky.
The Flux of Days
by Zinta Aistars
We swelter in sirocco breezes,
simmering in a feverish summer sun.
Golden fields of doing nothing. Nothing.
But breathing. Deep. Slow.
Infused with salted air and watching
the spit and spume of surf throwing
her lacy white skirts to the sky: dance with me.
Languorous, so that our bodies rise and rock
into each other’s bones, rib cages meshing,
skin melding, tucked inside and around,
limbs intertwined and synchronized.
Tango the summer across the dance floor,
salsa a storm into the sky,
sultry and unrelenting,
until it surrenders,
until the sky grows leaden with anticipation
of the fall.
Solace
by Zinta Aistars
The prairie wind grows still
and slumbers.
It settles soft
into the rust of sun swept grasses.
Another day, perhaps.
This day silence blesses—
its dreamless sleep a velvet cloak
spread across the eyes,
a body lying warm beside you,
beloved face already stamped
across your weighted mind.
All is well, even now,
when my hand holds yours
across a distance,
even now, when you’re convinced
you stand alone,
this silence sanctified.
Spells Spoken at Dawn
by Zinta Aistars
"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."
--from the "Conclusion" to Walden by Henry Thoreau
Say the words, go on, say them: e-lu-ci-date.
Divulge the unfettered stream of synonyms
for a good day (benevolent, satisfactory, excellent,
virtuous, merciful, prime, effective, productive, choice),
the very finest kind, sun quickening
through the blinds in new dawn,
(beginning, daybreak, sunup, aurora, cockcrow),
a hastening of gossamer hope
(optimism, faith, confidence, trust, wish, aspiration,
desire). Seek that place,
nebulous dream (vision, incubus, imagination, muse)
come true in the seeking itself.
Pronounce it begun—the soft delirium.
Call it done—the undoing,
the initial mess of gathering seed,
choosing the grains one by one, the plump
and promising ones, firm to the touch,
eager for the field (clearing, pasture, realm, domain,
blank white page, unmarred)
of the day ahead, a radiant reverie
of possibility, a harvest
even before the hull splits in two, the root
feathering into delicate threads that grasp
(hold, squeeze, caress) the earth to suck
(breathe deeply and inhale)
its life-giving vigor, startle of life,
and you (every dawn, each one)
the sprouting urchin with buckling knees
standing, again, for the very first time.
University Of Michigan-Flint
Flint, MI
Graduated: 1979
Student status: Alumni
Degree: Bachelor's Degree
Major: English with emphasis on creative writing
1978 to 1979
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, MI
Graduated: N/A
Student status: Alumni
Degree: None
Major: English -- Transferred to U of M
Managing Editor for the literary ezine, The Smoking Poet; on editorial board for the literary ezine, insolent rudder; co-editor for college alumni magazine, LuxEsto; and poetry editor for Her Circle Ezine.
About me: Zinta Aistars is the published author of three books and managing editor of THE SMOKING POET. She is Publications Editor for a health care organization in Grand Rapids. Prior to that, Zinta was an editor and writer for LuxEsto, the Kalamazoo College alumni magazine for seven years. Her work has also appeared in the Greater Guide of Southwest Michigan, Kalamazoo Gazette, Southwest Michigan Living, Kindred Spirits Magazine, County Wide News, Daily Mining Gazette, Encore, Welcome Home, and Parade of Homes magazines, and the Latvian newspaper Laiks. She has published poetry, travel essays, stories, and articles in the United States, Latvia, England, Sweden, Germany, and Australia.
Who I'd like to meet:
Artists and art lovers of any size, shape, venue, color, or passion. Everyone has a story, and I love a good story - the telling, the hearing, and the writing of it. But nothing more than the living of it.
THE SMOKING POET: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS – FALL 2008!
THE SMOKING POET publishes flash fiction; fiction; nonfiction; poetry; feature author interview; feature poet; feature artist (by invitation only); book and cigar reviews. We publish work that ignites our imagination, inflames our passion, leaves us with a smoky aftertaste. The Smoking Poet also shares an extensive list of links and resources for writers and the cigar aficionado.
Submissions open year round. Send with editor’s attention in subject line: poetry to Zinta Aistars; fiction to Russell Rowland; general non-fiction and cigar themed fiction/ non-fiction/poetry and cigar reviews to J. Conrad Guest. For book reviews, please query first.