Elizabeth Cohen
poet, author, writing coach, editor
photo by Torunn Aberle
I am a New Mexican poet, editor and author, running a boutique book coaching business, BookCoachMagick, offering everything from one-on-one intensive manuscript coaching and writing services, to global writing retreat experiences. I also edit Memoirabilia, an online memoir journal and serve as editorial consultant for Mnemosyne Books, a womens memoir imprint.
In addition to these activities, I write poetry, fiction and essays. New stories and works can be read in The Coachella Review, Spotlong Review, Cagibi, Minyan Magazine, Confetti, Persimmon Tree, Brussels Review, Reed Magazine, and other literary venues. My poems have been recently published in Blue Mesa, San Antonio Review, A Room of Her Own; Mid Atlantic Review, Crosswinds, Yale Review, and anthologies such as Love in the Original Language, Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975; Ink; Sonia Sanchez at 90; Rising From the Ashes: Musings on Menopause, edited by Lisa Seidlarz, Too Much Love: Stories of Mothering, edited by Nitza Agam, and the forthcoming Climate Change Chronicles. In addition, I am the author of six books of poetry, a celebrated memoir, a book of short stories, and The Scalpel and The Silver Bear, a co-authored book of essays with Dr. Lori Arviso Alvord, the first Navajo woman surgeon, recently (March 2025) chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books about women in science.
I am excited about my newest book of poetry,
Mermaids of Albuquerque, from Saint Julian Press, a finalist
in the 2025 New Mexico Book Awards contest.
I have an MFA in creative writing/poetry from Columbia University and recently retired from my position as an associate professor of English from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh to work on my writing and as a full-time writing coach and publisher, returning to my beloved home state of New Mexico.
In addition to serving on the editorial board of Mnemosyne, I am on the board and edit for High Desert Haint, a Santa Fe publisher and formerly served on the board of the North Star Museum of the Underground Railroad, among other associations. I teach creative writing classes with Gotham Writers Workshops in New York City.
I love books and writing them. I love a tough freelance journalism assignment I can dig into. I like to draw, although I am pretty bad at it. I love to go to far flung places and then write about them.
A peace advocate, I stand for fair pay, equal rights, reproductive rights, queer and trans rights, diversity, feminism, preserving the natural places of the planet, and protecting the animals.
I have volunteered at Barrett House, a women's shelter in Albuquerque where I run writing workshops. I work with special needs children in the Albuquerque Public Schools.
I love kids, dogs, and horses. I love black coffee and rye toast.
That about covers it.
Former Editor of Saranac Review
Visiting Professor WCSU
MFA Mentor, WCSU
SUNY Plattsburgh Associate Professor
Gotham Writers Workshops Instructor
Book Reviewer (American Book Review, @theinkwell)
MacDowell Fellow
Columbia University MFA
UNM BA, Magna Cum Laude,
Oprah Magazine Book-of-the-Week
Jeri Desrochers, Braceros Series Lettuce, 2012, oil on canvas. Collection of New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum. Gift of Jeri Desrochers (2020.011.2).
New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum (Las Cruces, NM).
Adult Category Winner
The Sound of One Hand Shouting
by Elizabeth Cohen
You can hear colors sometimes.
Lean over. Put your ear to the paint.
Shut your eyes.
That’s the sound of orange becoming a hat.
Of blue becoming wrinkles in a shirt.
Specks of green, a head of lettuce.
That sound is the sound of colors breathing.
The sound of sweat becoming food.
The sound of paint becoming a field
Into the labor that feeds us.
Turning a slash of white into a slicing knife.
That is the sound of colors shouting.
The sound of yourself believing.
Selected / Recent Poetry
RECENT/SELECTED POEMS
Flapper Press, 2025
I am waiting for you here in the museum of faraway friends.
Past the exhibit of the first graders in frilly dresses eating popsicles, down the hall. Keep left.
Don't get confused by the exhibit of cloud gazing friends,
thrifting friends, swimming pool and gym friends,
or sidetracked by the cafe, so distracting,
with all those foods we used to eat.
Just keep going, past the exquisite cocktail
drinking fountain, on the right. See that soft glowing light?
THAT IS IT, THAT IS US, in our gallery of hearts.
There we are in all our beautiful places.
See the way the light falls on our wedding dresses?
See the way we could make atoms rearrange?
See those tickets to the Lion King,
there on that silver pedestal?
Don't miss the alcove of kitty photographs.
And that, there, that bright light,
coming from the amphitheater,
that is the hall of hilarious anecdotes
related during holidays.
Go ahead. Listen and crack up as I do.
There are are postcards in the gift shop.
Sign the guest book. Tell me what you think.
The Museum of 3:00 am
This is when they visit you
all the gathered pieces
of everything.
They come rushing in
in groups, in squads,
in platoons, in cliques.
And the occasional
straggler, too, some guy
wearing an interesting cap.
They have a lot they want
to discuss with you, about
the future of the oceans,
the way things turn sideways
before they fall, how you
are still afraid of the high dive
(and what that says about you).
Why you are alone.
You ask them to back off
please, to give you some space
but then they come back with
“space is the place” quoting
Sun Ra, and “Space, the final
Frontier,” quoting Star Trek.
“Please, please, already,” you say,
“I need rest.” But they are
adamant visitors, not just drop ins;
they’re carrying picnic baskets
and to do lists that scroll down
like Rapunzel hair.
“Order those opera tickets,”
they command, “Eat more fruit!”
And you, poor soul, listen up
until, finally, sleep pops up
and grabs you by the pajama lapel.
“Come this way,” it whispers,
“I know a secret exit ramp
from the museum.”
It’s a slide and you climb
on and let yourself go
slowly down, then faster,
into your pillow, into some
little snip of abstraction,
a not-annoying dream,
and then tomorrow.
L’esprit de L’escalier
what was not said
can become a shadow
ghosting around
like a small curse,
an underbreath mutter
some words, the lazy
things, just wait around
until it’s too late,
missing the train
of the moment,
missing the party.
missing the curtain call
and the audition
that time a woman told me
I could not take off work
for pre-natal care; that time
a man told me I need to
somehow, expensively,
fix my teeth, that time
a colleague said I should
let him take my daughter
on a canoe trip; that time
someone smashed my car,
took my dog, dropped me
off alone, in snow, far
from home.
Those times I was put on hold
when calling help lines
the time we waited hours
in an ER, bleeding, expiring,
holding onto vanishing hope
and all the other times
when I should have located
those sentences, and spoken
up, but didn’t
when all the right words
slunk away, went into hibernation
and would not re-appear
now I am carrying them
around like extra clothes
I’ll never wear, in the small
satchel of my life
I still see them, hear them
calling me out, wasted bastards,
waiting for the past to circle
back so they can have their
moment, rush out into the air
and do that important dance
they missed out on
which I am pretty sure will
never happen
yet here they are with all the others,
the I’m sorrys and what the fucks
and you sucks
and the elaborate ones
which quote some
version of Baldwin:
“be careful what you set
your heart upon”; “it is easier
to cry than change”;
“fires can’t be made
with dead embers”;
“it is expensive to be poor”;
“love is growing up”
Cloud Mountain
watch the sun climb
down the cloud mountain
step by step, slowly
navigating the gauzy terrain
as if it is the first time it
ever traveled this route,
as if it’s nervous it might
trip and tumble into some
cloud ravine, or cloud crevasse,
don’t worry sun, you’ve
got this, you might think,
or you are the sun, for god’s sake,
but watching there, that
tentative pull through
scattershot mist, through
the almost liquid, the puff
and tangle pulling down.
like blinds, a semi-dark,
it becomes clear:
no matter how often a journey
is traveled, every step contains
some new kind of effort,
a tender center moment of risk.
There is always that fear
when climbing, of going sideways,
stepping off the train into the gap,
twisting, breaking, falling,
losing your way in the world.
Imagine them sunbathing on Sandia Peak,
long locks rustling like Mexican feather grass.
And later, down in the bosque, flipping iridescent
tails skyward, diving into the acequia.
Once a month, they go to Tingley Beach to feed the geese,
bathe in moonlight, listen to the opera of animals
at the zoological park, serenading their abducted children
they know they’ll never see again.
The mermaids of Albuquerque understand.
Once they had a great sea, waves and particles
that rose and fell, tided and king tided, exhaling weeds
and shell onto ancient beaches, luring ancestors of birds.
Once they had currents, grottos, spin-cycling whirlpools.
They fanned themselves with lacy bryozoans.
Collected coin-size brachiopods like souvenirs.
Swam through whole apartment complexes of fish.
The mermaids of Albuquerque visit Bone Spring cemetery,
a limestone catalog of the last mass extinction.
Bivalve clams and brachiopods stamp the headstones.
Sea urchin and nautiloid spirit the cliffs.
The mermaids of Albuquerque sing to their departed sea
dried now into a circuitry of salted slot canyons,
long-limbed black mesas, peppered with ash.
To an alkaline ledger of species, keeping track.
Now, truck stops inlet the basin. Diesel-hunting schools
of long haulers congregate, freighted with vegetables,
electronics, and human cargo, too. Beating hearts,
tied to one another, like baled hay.
The mermaids of Albuquerque sing to their captivity.
They’ve witnessed every genre of vanishing.
They swim the asphalt interstate, passing miles
of pumpjacks, greedily milking the blood past.
The mermaids of Albuquerque sing to the ghosts of buffalo,
to hidden caverns of copper and bats. They know this
has nothing to do with them. Not the microchipped
desert, the fire-scorched hills, the anemic Rio Grande,
Pecos, Gila and Las Animas, waterways veined
with unstable isotopes and plastic shopping bags,
discarded tires, beer cars, and rock cliffs imprinted
with skeletons of extinct, cartilaginous fish.
The mermaids of Albuquerque swim toward endzones,
singing to dreamers who survived borderlands; singing
to the river, rigged to catch refugees. They recognize it:
the world changes without sentiment, leaving pieces behind.
Look at what has survived the defection of those waters.
The dried seabed scuttles with scorpion, slithering snakes.
It’s not hard to imagine lobster and seasnake ancestors,
great underwater creatures, silently paddling the expanse.
link to:
Flapper Press
The Museum of Faraway Friends
AROHO
I Come From Dust
I could say I come
from dust, from rocks
Potatoes, centuries of bloody
fingers, tatting lace
I could say I come a thousand years
wandering in a desert
Russian steppes, pograms
death camps, bone yards
I could say I come
from candles
reversed mirrors
glasses of wine
I could say I come from
a Purple heart, moldy feet
in the jungles of the Philippines
from decoded enemy messages
crossword puzzles
recipes for soup
I could say I come from laundry
washed in a bathtub in Cleveland,
the American
labor movement
I could say I come from heat
I could say I come from ice
all these things are true
but opening my heart’s book, I say
I come from 8209 A Guadalupe Trail
the place I lost and grew teeth
planted striped zucchini
climbed a rickety windmill
learned a Torah parsha,
buried dogs, cats, generations
of chickens, one goat,
infinite goldfish
I come from a small sanctuary
under a fallen tree on the irrigation ditch
where I came to see every person
under a tree is drinking shade
every person is water
feeding a tree
I’m from the nectar
of Guadalupe Trail
from long thin scratches
from Russian Olives
an invasive species introduced
in the late 1800s, run wild
that’s me, an imported
barefoot wild girl
swung many dozen times
over that ditch on a knotted rope
we are all the places we began
and if you leave and return
you might even walk someday
on top of your old footprints
you might hear distant barking
from across the decades
of that last dog
crushed by a hit-and-run on 4th Street
still calling for you
to save her
Aftermath
in the latter days, the devastation was feathered
by the delicate embrace of smoke
the voices of the survivors arrived like blown kisses
there was a sense
of a softening
or maybe we were just used to it all
someone said that there was bread
at the supermarket on Upper Front Street
someone else said no, it was all gone
there were the aubades of children, whimpering
the operatic sighs of the elderly, who wore the beautiful woven
blankets of their sorrow
someone said the corona of the sun had untethered
a storm of electromagnetic waves
someone else said they saw a field of sunflowers davening
In the latter days, water was warmer, the air
was warmer, the planet was warm and weary of us
after the earthquake, the flood,
after the flood, the wildfire
after the wildfire, the fund-raising rock festival
and the hurricanes, one and two and three
later, came the polar winters
and food harvested by the child-armies
in the hills. They were told they were the future
which they were not sure they believed
The Cabbage
It took me far too long to crack the spine
open the silken pages
to read the book of the cabbage.
Peruse the pages of luminous flesh;
consider all the smooth, ivory opinions.
The tough orb in its squeaky jacket
called me out in the vegetable aisle
of Price Chopper. It had a story
which had come up from the dark loam.
It had traveled with its siblings,
captive in a bin,
brave immigrants
to this fluorescent country.
It took me years to learn
the braille of the cabbage
discover its intelligence,
the ways it can instruct bellies
to be brim-full, finished with hunger.
Simmered in the pan
with a single cleft of garlic
the leaves go soft to the spoon
inside the mouth, they are wholesome
and rubbery.
They make sense.
You can consume the cabbage
just like this, boiled to clarity.
Or wrap the steamed
pages of flesh around other foods
in an embrace of sweet crunch
or chop them into a stew.
You could bring some
to your neighbor cooked into a soup,
(he is eighty-seven
fought in the Korean War)
Or chop it up teensy for the infant
daughter of your ex-babysitter
who smears the leaves on her chin
You could stir fry it with raisins
(I swear this is good)
The world is unraveling
but cabbage is steady.
High seas encroach on island nations, mud tumbles down hillsides,
burying towns
Yet there it sits anyway, stubborn
and sure of itself, on the counter
rotund, earnest
Everywhere, ice is invading
or shrinking, rivers are drying up
whole lakes can vanish in a day
but the cabbage is without struggle
Pure muscle that comes up
from the earth.
Coming Soon:
The Artichoke
Every time you make someone laugh, you give them a small vacation."-Joan Rivers
Stay Tuned...
From
Martini Tattoo; The Economist's Daughter; Wonder Electric, Mother Love and Impossible Furniture
my mother taught me
how to crush a clove of garlic
with the heel of my hand
and watch the skin fall right off,
like a bride disrobing, her dress
left behind, in a heap of tulle
she taught me how to peel
a hardboiled egg perfectly,
leaving the smooth skin
unblemished and pure,
and how to unwind the thick glossy
shawl of the orange,
leaving an enchanted swirl
also, how to:
toothpick a cake
harden sugar
salt caramel
braise flesh
and because of her mammoth patience
I know how to rumcake and fruitcake,
how to gingerbread and even soufflé
(which is touchy)
in the grocery store, she would use her secret powers
to knock on the melons and assess the beans,
she was a necromancer of beets
but it was green-black oval of the avocado
that showcased her best sorcery;
she could parse the contents with a single touch
and split one neatly, removing its heart
like the woodsman in Snow White
who had been instructed by the witch,
"bring me the heart"
in this case, you keep it; leave it there in the crushed
green flesh of the guacamole, salted and leaved
with chopped cilantro and garlic,
the seed heart will protect this stew like a charm
"leave it right in there," she said
tossing a pinch of salt over her shoulder.
"Remove the pit and before you know it
the whole thing will go black"