Materials: hinged jewelry box, embroidery thread, beads, ink, and card.
Verse: excerpt from Pathways (Bullet Hole Riddle, 2014).

Glass, plastic, and paua beads.

Materials: Velvet hinged box, embroidery thread, beads and crystals, acrylic paint, and ink.
Poem: Excerpt from Pathways (Bullet Hole Riddle, 2014).

Paint on blue velvet.

Ink wash and card on blue velvet - space for a personal message.

From the top: The Jewellery Box, 2017; The Survival Box, 2016; The Perfume Box, 2012

Materials: Old jewelry box with ribbon, collage (National Geographic and gift-wrap), ink pen. Verse: A) At the time (Bullet Hole Riddle, 2014) and B) The pursuit of happiness (2017, unpublished).

At the time...

there was too much to say / so she said nothing...

the words knotted their arms together / all octopus and impenetrable ocean...

swam furiously / but could not find the surface.

You say you only want to be happy like everyone else / but sometimes prison bars look like a face smiling or laughter...

sometimes they look like a human simply walking around in their skin / you can watch closely but you only see skin...

you see smiles and teeth / you see happy and sometimes happy is the same weight as sad...

sometimes happy puts sad in a choke hold / schoolyard bully, prison guard, lock.

I wake up and there are gaps everywhere / a gap on the bed / a gap in the morning / a gap in the night that follows it...

a thousand soft little gaps that creep up mute before me shadows of a thing I want to stay attached to / and you say at least and talk about other things after the right amount of time...

move me away from myself like it could save me from becoming a line drawing or gesture of myself / the mere suggestion of a body in space / like one of Matisse's five dancing ladies...

we always assume they are celebrating something / but maybe they are one woman in five positions / dancing around her griefs.

Every Hebrew noun is either masculine or feminine / eretz, the word for land, is feminine - bayit, the word for house, is masculine / emet, the word for truth is feminine and davar, the word for thing is masculine...

most names of streets, cities and countries are feminine Jerusalem, Aza, and Israel are all feminine / In Hebrew every verb must agree with the gender of its subject...

Dear, Israel
this is just to remind you
the words for mother
are em and imah.