Sometimes we look at the Difficult Things and Find Beauty
robynhuntpoetry.com
Picture Window
(excerpted from The Fiction of Stillness)
Six women arrive at the table. We cup lingering insomnia and
remnant dreams in crowded dissipating wisps,
confusing directions and faceless men. We arrive to decipher...
I patiently steep my drink
Fortunes printed on our tea-bag tags.
The crowded world on the other side...
MY STORY
Among my former lives, I owned a small bookstore in the San Francisco Bay Area and ran printing presses with a print and design collective, producing “bread and butter” jobs to enable the creation of poetry books and broadsides. While on the West Coast, I read poems with a cadre of smart misfits on the steps of city hall and in North Beach drinking establishments. I was arrested at least once protesting at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. I attended San Francisco State University, studying Creative Writing in the ‘70s during the early birth pangs of slam and language poetry. Returning more than 30 years ago to my native Santa Fe, I occupied a New Mexico legislative press box as reporter and hosted ongoing readings and other literary events in a bookstore on the Old Santa Fe Trail.
My inaugural collection of poems, The Shape of Caught Water, was released in 2013 and selected for award by the New Mexico Press Women’s 2014 Poetry Division competition. Other writing includes a one act play, In Possibility: An Imaginary Correspondence, co-authored with Evangeline Brown and produced by Theaterwork in Santa Fe. My work is available in various journals. I live today with my husband in Santa Fe where I works as a Development and Communications Director for a non-profit social services agency (www.lascumbres-nm.org).
MY BOOKS
These poems evoke the author's focus on finding respite during breast cancer treatment and recovery - the physical touchstones carried into the chemo ward, the calming touch of her daughter, cherry juice to offset the loss of taste, and an ongoing retreat to a nearby porch. This dialogue with cancer seeks to dispel fear and offer remedy, including the promise of milagros, the body's visible and invisible medical tattoos, and a renewed understanding of stillness and healing.
Thanks to the editor and designer at Saddle Road Press for the exceptional production of this book.
In this human family, a man digs a hole in his backyard for a swimming pool. Another inks his lover's name on his knuckles. A wife sings to her husband who does not hear her. The inhabitants learn a language that lifts beyond the bills being paid, drunk on the tastes they had nearly forgotten.
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This collection is available in limited edition for sale directly from the author: robyn.covelli@icloud.com
NEXT EVENTS
Poetry Readings & Other News
No readings currently scheduled. Come back and visit again! In the meantime,
please enjoy selections of poetry and other writing below.
WHEN
Saturday, April 25, 2026, 2pm until closing
WHERE:
Barnes and Noble Bookstore, Santa Fe Place, 4250 Cerrillos Road, Santa Fe
Ph 505.531.9751
WHAT:
Book signing in the store
WHEN
March 9, 2026, 7pm (with Poet's Potluck beginning at 6pm)
WHERE
Entropy Gallery, 1220 Parkway Drive Santa Fe, NM 87507
WHAT
Floating Words Poetry Series. Join me with longtime friend, poet and journalist Wren Propp as
we ponder a theme, Comeback: Confidence and Fear, exploring the lives we once envisioned and
where we have landed today.
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​WHEN
This reading has taken place (first Sunday in May) but you can view a recording here.
The reading is just under one hour in length and opens with Robyn reading and follows with conversation between both poets and then a short set as well by Ellen La Flèche. More poems and more conversation follows.
WHERE
This was a virtual reading.
WHAT
How disease manifests as blossoms in the hands of poets. I will be reading with Ellen LaFlèche, a mutual Saddle Road Press author, in the press' First Sunday of the Month Reading series. Ellen's breathtaking collection, Walking into Lightning, explores
the shared experience of her husband's life with ALS. Her poems "explore physical love and loss, the complications of memory, of the small personal, persistent sorrows." My own title, The Fiction of Stillness, has been described in one review as "a map of the twisting road of cancer 'where soft tissue is knitted with worry stones' "
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FROM THE POET
Sustenance
Wild overhang. No one goes here. Even rain is tentative,
brings down October and noon has little influence.
Blanched bark tree pretends at green willow. Purple oval berries
strung above me on thin twigs wink in stippled sunlight,
mock sustenance.
I could crawl inside this shabby canopy where the house’s
silver window screens are tattered flags,
long ago surrendered to high desert heat.
Fallen from their frames. Quietly cut away as if
night robbery.
Nature taking back. This washed out chair
in the temporary shade receives my weight
Arms and legs let down as God’s small
ants eat away at other trees and bushes, panorama
boxes of rejuvenation.
Here a dandelion spike so tall it has wished itself into a sunflower.
Nearby pink frill bells dangle on stems in enthusiastic spurts.
Growth where we had not dared to go until today.
Anxious path toward rest. As underfoot,
red leaves break into pieces.
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God's Filing Cabinet
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My mother and I sat under the sunset sky before the clouds were turning the anticipated lipstick pinks or plum. Instead, we witnessed startling whites lit from behind and deepening blues. Blues approaching navy and leaning into gun metal grey. Like the occasional soldier tense days of late as mom meekly continues to transition into her senior facility. A self-contained living place that could be anywhere but one nonetheless alive with tall flickering trees and brave koi, three square meals a day, and two large potted geraniums on her small porch that we must remember to water. Residents rolling through the air-conditioned halls with black, red and blue four wheel walkers or placing one compromised foot in front of the other. But right now, on the terrace in the third-floor lap of crisp late day, wicker chairs held our two padded skeletons and there wasn’t much to say. Elbows nearly touching. Short weary legs draped. Leaning back.
We fell quickly into naming the moving cumulus accumulation. “An elephant with very large trunk”, I pointed straight ahead. My mom commented not on shape but striking color. “That grey reminds me of a filing cabinet”, she said, following with this clarifying comment that put my poet’s brain in overdrive, “God’s filing cabinet.” she said. “What do you think God would put in his filing cabinet, Mom?”, I asked her. “Names and dates? Favorite photographs, slips of paper that in a few years would be a stretch to remember their significance?” Oh, wait, this is God we’re talking about, I think. I should probably give him/her more credit.
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“All the names of those that have done his good work”, the preacher’s daughter, my only child mother, responded on unwavering point. I nodded my head and thought, yes, in this evening story, that’s probably entirely correct. It began to rain a few acknowledgement drops.
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