About the painting: “I am primarily a poet and paint for enjoyment only. I’d never sent any of my  paintings out (although my poetry is published) before this. I have Kool Aid guy hanging right here in my office. While it began as an exercise in color in line, it seemed to paint itself. I had just taken on administrative duties in addition to teaching (assistant principal) and apparently my ambivalence about my dual role needed an outlet.”

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Rachel Squires Bloom: I have had poems in The Hawaii Review, Poet Lore, Fugue, Poetry East, Main Street Rag, Kimera, Nomad’s Choir, The Mad Poet’s Review, Bluster, 96 Inc., Bellowing Ark, Slugfest, Thin Air, Taproot Literary Review, True Romance, Lucid Stone, Green Hills Literary Lantern, California Quarterly, Chest,and A View from the Bed. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that I wrote my first poem at age six on a paper plate, struck at the insight that the two-syllable “flower” rhymed with “power,” edging me beyond cat-bat-hat. I rarely write about flowers now, although they occasionally appear as imagery, along with soup kitchens, pillbugs, passports, crickets, and the bones of Capuchin monks.