Sometimes we look at the Difficult Things and find Beauty
robynhuntpoetry.com
My mother and I sat under the sunset sky before the clouds were turning the anticipated lipstick pinks or plum purple. 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.iterature of illness and healing...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.” “What do you think God would put in his filing cabinet, Mom?”, I asked her.
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MY STORY
Among her former lives, Robyn Hunt 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, she read poems with a cadre of smart misfits on the steps of city hall and in North Beach drinking establishments. She was arrested at least once protesting at Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. She 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 her native Santa Fe, she 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.
Her 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. Her work is also visible on her blog, As Mourning Doves Persist, and in various journals. She lives today with her husband in Santa Fe where she works as a development and communications director for a non-profit social services agency.
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.
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.
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' "
FROM THE POET
My mother and I sat under the sunset sky before the clouds were turning the anticipated lipstick pinks or plum purple. 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.
“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.
From The Fiction of Stillness
Bling
Yesterday my echo-scan tech
was Alexis in a white coat
with eight lapel pins, encrusted
silver fleur-de-lis and rhinestone
butterfly, brooch of cubic zirconia
I imagine I would have found
on my grandmother’s nightstand
fifty-two years ago.
“Undress from the waist up,”
she advises, “gown open to the back.”
This but one of half a hundred gowns
I’ve worn this year. Today an action
photo of my heart, measuring muscle
to monitor the effects of medicine
meddling with protein,
cancer’s appetizer.
Her canvas, my left breast and the arch
in my throat where I swallow.
“Put your left arm above your head
as if preparing for a nap.”
I hold my breath on inhalation so that
the diaphragm can move away for
better viewing. Sound wave unable,
she explains, to pass through air or bone.
As the pandemic still restricts, we both
wear masks closed at the bridge of our nose.
Disguising mouths and preventing
smiles from escaping. I hear the wash
of beating, of my valves’ persistence.
Eleven weeks in for chemo,
one week out. This hospital and its
sister clinic soon to become merely
those buildings that I point to:
there is where my daughter was born, I’ll say,
and there I shared a room with cancer’s
conqueror. Badges for entry, the surgical slits.
Endurance’s gold necklace and heavy watch.
Through both visitations I could have easily
slept, as today, while my heart maintains
its familiar tasks. Alexis’s transducer
moving across flesh like a divining rod.
Pillows under my head
and legs like foreign animals
in yet another conversation with patience
splayed on a mechanic’s table,
passive to the passage of sound bouncing
in this necessary recital of the body
under another’s hands. Electrodes on my chest,
temporary bling.