M L Clark

@mlclark

Writer (SFWA), translator, humanist, general odd duck • 🇨🇦n in 🇨🇴 • avoids pronouns, they/them if key 🌈🌌

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M L Clark@mlclark· 19d

You know why I love a good #ArtBreak? Because when I'm caught up in my hardships, worries, stressors... a single painting, a single artistic *perspective* on the world, can still break through all that noise & compel me to slow down. That's what the work of Markus Matthias Krüger did for me today.

"Poplar Avenue in the Storm" by Markus Matthias Kruger, 2010

"Winterdrama #8" by Markus Matthias Kruger, 2019

M L Clark@mlclark· 21d

Today my teen ward has her first emancipation court date, after her "mother" appeared last week to extort money from her. I've been worried for her all week. Today's #ArtBreak is Czech artist Jakub Schikaneder (1855-1924). His work reminds me that humanity is no stranger to loneliness in the fray.

"A Street in Winter," by Jakub Schikaneder, 1910

"By the Girl's Bed", by Jakub Schikaneder (1909)

M L Clark@mlclark· 22d

Bertie didn't make it through the night, but she was perfect while she was here. (Automeris io, or maybe belti, from the family Saturniidae. The deer-eyed or ox-eyed moth.) #Nature

This little critter found a safe place to wind down for good. Only after death did I see her beautiful inner spots.

M L Clark@mlclark· 23d

Say hello to my little #BugFriend, Bertie the Deer-Eyed Moth (Automeris io, from the family Saturniidae). Last night in the dark I thought she was a black witch moth, but the distinctive grumpy downturned face showed up at dawn. This girl needs coffee to greet the day! 😂 #Nature

My sleepy little nocturnal companion is a dull rusty brown with faint eye spots over what has the appearance of a frown line while her wings are closed. About the size of my palm, and very fuzzy!

M L Clark@mlclark· 25d

It's been forever since my last #ArtBreak. These surrealist works by oil painter Tokuhiro Kawai are a beautiful reminder that the world is full of opportunities to rethink what it means to build monumental stories out of the everyday. There are new beginnings everywhere - even in worn-out tales.

"Galileo Satellites" (2025) by Tokuhiro Kawai

"Ignorant Person" (2004) by Tokuhiro Kawai

"Melancholia of Regeneration" (2016) by Tokuhiro Kawai

M L Clark@mlclark· 26d

This has been a heavy weekend for me. What I try to remember, when hit with hard news, is how much fear, grief, and anger doesn't just estrange us; it also makes us deeper kin. Today's #PoetryBreak reminds me we're all bargaining with such strange and messy worlds within. Go gently out there, eh?

I Put On My Socks in the Wrong Order and Now I'm Gonna Get Hit By A Car

Neil Hilborn

I think as I put on my boots anyway. I’m supposed to
resist compulsions when I feel capable

because it makes the misfiring neurons weaker, and today

I’m feeling capable of lots of stuff, so I guess that means
today I’m fighting my brain. When the brain says,
“You’re gonna bleed out on the sidewalk,”

I’ll say, “Then the grass will have something

to drink.” When the brain says, “This is the day

you go to the bridge,” I’ll say, “But there are

so many bridges.” Nothing gets to want me
dead and avoid the consequences. You’ll get
the socks you get, brain, we’re going to the airport.

M L Clark@mlclark· 28d

I haven't left my apartment for more than a store run in over a week. Just utterly swamped at work, and the wallop of fever hasn't helped. But when you let work consume you, it's easy to feel like a failure no matter how much you do. So I'm going for a wee walk and... enjoying this #PoetryBreak. 🕊️

FLOWERS
L. E. Bowman

I like it when people brake for squirrels.
When they scoop bugs onto napkins
and gently set them outside. I like it when
people put their shopping carts back and
smile at strangers and hold open doors.
I like the awkward run, the breathless
thank you. I like it when people share
appetizers and good news and book
recommendations. When they get do
excited that their hands become actors
and their story comes out as a spark.
I like it when people offer these bright,
little flowers. these tender, yellow bursts.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jul 13

O Merlin my Merlin. I don't harbour parasocial behaviours toward any celebrity - and quite honestly, I've never wanted to meet any of them. Their work is enough. Much of Sam Neill's acting favoured a representation of kindness that was very special to me growing up. I am so grateful for his art.

Sam Neill in the 1998 miniseries Merlin.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jul 4

WHEW. Finally! Just got word that she has arrived safe and sound in Venezuela. I received a frantic message from her yesterday at 5am because there was a difficult situation on the jungle highway, but they got through safely. #PoetryBreak via Stephen Dunn while I breathe out, then back to work. 💪🏻

The Past
Stephen Dunn

Herrings begin to glow just after they die,
never while alive. When I read this
I wanted to sit for a long time in the dark.
Nothing in nature is a metaphor.
Everything is. I thought both thoughts.
And knew inexactly why I felt sad.
Herrings dead and aglow--
I should have been properly amazed,
the way anyone looking at a star
would be, realizing it was years away,
untouchable. Yet there it is, shining.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jul 3

Well, I received a crisis text from her at 5am near the border, so we're not out of the woods yet. But I got to the park to watch the dawn, & I've had my #PoetryBreak before the day begins in earnest. It will be okay. Bird by bird. Crisis by crisis. #Poem by poem. (@joysullivanpoet on Instagram)

My mother says kissing a man without a mustache is like eating eggs without salt

Which is a better way of saying--take the scenic route.
Say I love you when it's true. Drive 12 hours just to touch.
Buy kumquats because they're called kumquats. Call
someone you love a little kumquat. Write letters. Recite
poems. Be verklempt. Rise early to hunt the moon. Eat
pastries whose names you can't pronounce. Astonish
everyone. Haunt everything. Sing, even if poorly. Press
the peek for zest. We're nothing but brief bodies. Hearts,
fragile as parakeets. Spit, lios, and longing. All we've got is
this skin. This necessary salt.

By Joy Sullivan, joysullivanpoet on Instagram.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jul 1

I was born on the traditional lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat, "where there are trees standing in the water" (Tkaronto, Toronto). Every July 1 I'm thankful to Kwakwaka’wakw artist Curtis Wilson for this version of the flag.

This is one of a few First Nations, Inuit, and Métis designs developed to centre and celebrate our history as a multinational, multicultural, and pluralist society.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jul 1

There are days when I see my many faults just amplifying before my eyes, and a profound sense of defeat/exhaustion kicks in. It ain't easy being human, eh? Next cosmic draw, I'm putting my name in for "Greenland shark" instead.

Look at this handsome critter, hundreds of years old, found near Nunavut in the Arctic Ocean.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jun 29

This is a big week. On Wednesday, things change for me and things change for the kid I'm putting on a bus to Venezuela. Am I ready? Well, I haven't finished everything I need to. But as this morning's #PoetryBreak reminds me, sometimes we take long hard roads to where and what we need to be next.

Kindness
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jun 28

And one more fresh draft for the night, before I wander home for a spot of tech work before bed and zoo day. This is obviously informed by recent events, and still super rough, but it's good to keep the juices flowing! (I have an SFF short story to finish soon. 🤞🏻) #Poetry #WritingCommunity

At the grey of dawn fresh yellow lines
stretch along the highway, incomprehensible.

How can they share this world with all
the latest videos of destruction passed around?

Shattered heart emojis, hymns and anthems,
vigil candles, Venezuelan flags.

The rubble and the recoveries–some “miracles”,
some merely limbs displaced from old homes.

In parts of the world such scenes are made
with intention. Politicians decide, day after day,

to lay ruin to life. But in others this level of disaster
arrives only indirectly: a savaging of the future

one greased palm at a time. Yet for every rift
that feels like the last, the worst; like the heart

cannot bear another case decided against compassion,
another culture making cruelty its native tongue,

still there come these bloody morning-afters–rudely,
impossibly–when fresh lines appear on the asphalt

and the repair work of small foolish apes presses on.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jun 28

I am sportsballing before more tech tasks tonight. And between halves in Colombia v. Portugal... a little time to polish a previous draft, if not finish something new. 🤞🏻 #Sportsball #Poetry #WritingCommunity

An intense and dedicated crowd in the mall for this match. One of many scattered and packed groups.

Lulo con leche, a turtle-bedecked poetry writing book, and me!

PAD THAI
M. L. Clark

On a Monday afternoon halfway across town
I order pad thai. I order the pad thai–
not the pad thai I first tried at fifteen, slipping
underage and un-carded into a bar
in the heart of the city, heady with smoke
and greasy to the touch, every surface sticky
from an overused rag, and the bar itself wreathed
by university lads with no compunction
about telling a miserable teen made worse
by the beer they were drinking, “Go kill yourself,
then, if life is really as awful as you believe,
and humanity as full of cruelty as you think”–
not that pad thai, over-salted and a bit dry,
as if to keep the brews flowing, but a pad thai
in conversation with that pad thai, succulent
and balanced, an immaculate and mature take
on the theme, consumed almost two lifetimes
later, opposite a teen taking photos of her first
in a safe restaurant, mango smoothie beside her,
and not a debate bro in sight. I don't know how
the chef knew that was the pad thai I needed,
but it was the pad thai he served me, and I am
still too old and world-weary to protest when,
even for a moment, such wizardry lays me low.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jun 27

It's been a wild week. The kid was supposed to go to Venezuela on Thurs, for about a month to emancipate herself from her long-absent mother, but now she leaves Wed. I'm taking her to the zoo tomorrow to build good memories before she enters a country recovering from the earthquakes. What a world.

An El Colombiano write-up about the disaster.

A follow-up article on where Colombians can donate to help.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jun 20

Being caregiver to this orphaned teen has been a roller coaster. But when I see her so proud to be doing well in school, after being out for years? That's when I remember how new life still is for her. For her, the best is yet to come. ❤️ I'm just a tiny stabilizing force before she launches in full.

Time to make space on the fridge for her latest report card! Apparently it's a great one!

M L Clark@mlclark· Jun 14

I thought I was going to have a quiet Sunday, but the teenager brought home her teen-mum-friend's baby last night without telling me. Welp. You know the rules. All babies left Chez Maggie will be fed, changed, and sung Peter, Paul, and Mary songs to until they become socialists. :)

M L Clark@mlclark· Jun 13

I was feeling so defeated today. Then I saw this headline, & it reminded me: We are all doing the best we can in shamelessly unjust systems. The only way we survive is with the courage to give ourselves and those around us grace in our imperfections, and by extending the platform where we can. 🫂

From The Guardian: SpaceX makes largest ever stock market debut, making Elon Musk world's first trillionaire.

M L Clark@mlclark· Jun 12

Taking a break to write for the first time since... March 24, apparently. 😬 At the time, I was too busy to write up the poem I wrote that day, but I think its take will be familiar to people a) caring for children, & b) trying to find the right words for our wounded world. #Poetry #WritingCommunity

I write all my first drafts by hand if I can!

To be so full of words and not use them.
Not that the right ones ever come easily
around teenagers, but try it in another tongue
after a workday spent holding your own,
and badly, and see how well you do plucking
the right inflection points like feathers from
the quivering mess of a mistranslated metaphor.
“In English,” you sigh, “this would be simpler”--
another in a long series of performative lies.
In English you chased the right words for years
and look where it got you. The right words
never as important as the trip wires between them,
and even the mine field fading from view:
a distant memory of another era, as important now
as games of “the floor is lava” in your youth.
What reckoning would have you, do you think,
if you told your accountant of the care
you took with some words, sometimes? “Yes,
I lived through such cruel times, but did you see
how deftly I turned a line within them?”
Fortunately, the adolescent in any language
has already marked you as non-combatant,
busy sponging up words and trip wires
all their own. Careful, you want to say–
careful through the fields of self-deception
that lie before you. But of what use is
Cassandra in any season? Language is there to
beguile you, for a while. And when the magic
weakens, there is laundry to be done.

–M. L. Clark

M L Clark@mlclark· May 21

I'm finally rounding the corner of what have been a very hard few months of day and night work. I feel good about what I've build, & excited to contribute to my community. But this #PoetryBreak, I have to remind myself to make time for everyday gratitude, too. We are such brief flickers, after all.

Going without Saying
By Bernard O’Donoghue

i.m. Joe Flynn

It is a great pity we don’t know
When the dead are going to die
So that, over a last companionable
Drink, we could tell them
How much we liked them.

Happy the man who, dying, can
Place his hand on his heart and say:
‘At least I didn’t neglect to tell
The thrush how beautifully she sings.’

from Gunpowder (Chatto, 1995)

M L Clark@mlclark· May 13

#ArtBreak Today I'm thinking about Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948), whose career had many phases - some consumed by teaching, some given to love of the art. Her Harlem Renaissance portraiture also elevated many *other* creators of the time. An artistic life is almost never just one thing, y'know?

"Girl in a Pink Dress" by Laura Wheeler Waring (1927)

"Portrait of a Boy" by Laura Wheeler Waring (1930)

"Four Friends" by Laura Wheeler Waring (1940s)

Cover of Beautiful Shades of Brown, a book about Laura Wheeler Waring by Nancy Churnin, illustrated by Felicia Marshall.

M L Clark@mlclark· Apr 26

This has been an incredibly tough & frustrating week. I think I've reached my limit. (The popsicle stand there is nice, at least!) I thought I might be able to take a day to regroup, but there's no end in sight. Had a serious cry about it, & today we dig in. Then I need to rethink everything.

M L Clark@mlclark· Apr 15

It's been too long since my last #ArtBreak. Hirō Isono, 1945-2013, is a master of forest scenes. You've probably seen his work used for puzzle art, but I think his pieces deserve more use in SFF covers, too. His "essence of the forest" transcends realism capture a very real "magic" in such realms.

"Into the Depths of the Sacred Forest" by Hirō Isono.

M L Clark@mlclark· Apr 13

#PoetryBreak If you're on Instagram, check out the @rosemerry.trommer, and the press @samarapressbooks. This one hit me just right today. The world is filled with over eight billion people carrying complex griefs. Be gentle with yours, mindful of theirs, and careful with the chasm between them.

Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Is Not Breaking
By Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.

Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.

There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.

M L Clark@mlclark· Apr 12

Taking a brief sit at my favourite park in the city. It's a little dangerous. Deep in Centro, there are drug-users and very desperate types about, along with idling families and elderly couples, etc. But that full mix of life is what I love about it. Everyone can enjoy this space. #Colombia

Mass is in session, or I would take photos inside the church in Parque Bolivar.

Simón Bolivar has a statue here, of course.

It's a beautiful sprawl of a park in the heart of Centro. Dangerous at times, but also richly full of life!

Also, I just love the flora and fauna here...

M L Clark@mlclark· Apr 12

Whenever I move through the book district in Centro, I feel a deep humility and gratitude for the work I get to do in genre. We who get to write, to publish, even to make a career of the written word, do so in a world where creative praxis is a privilege. What are we doing to extend the platform?

A chalk drawing of the famous Latin American comic Condorito.

Vendors set out used books for sale right on the street.

Tons of humble vendors, most without any official location, set out their wares in Centro, keen on a sale.

M L Clark@mlclark· Apr 12

Ya casi a la mitad. 👌🏻 Halfway there, and a GREAT steps day in process. #Walkabout #Ciclovia

Halfway home now, from the bottom of the metro line to the top.

Over 20,000 steps so far, some spent wandering a little off track.

M L Clark@mlclark· Apr 12

Ciclovía vibes. :)

M L Clark@mlclark· Apr 12

Health and wellness can be cultivated by our built environments. Do we create spaces where it is easy to be in nature, to be with each other, to celebrate safely in community? Or do our social networks inundate us with hateful rhetoric and amplify distrust of our neighbours? #Walkabout #Colombia