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See YouTube video of Chicago poet Janet Kuypers reading her poem “Earrings Glow on the Beach” at Lake Michigan 9/2/19 in Kenosha, WI (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix T56 camera).

See YouTube video of Chicago poet Janet Kuypers reading her poem “Earrings Glow on the Beach” at Lake Michigan 9/2/19 in Kenosha, WI (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix T56 camera; Cyan filter).

See YouTube video of Chicago poet Janet Kuypers reading her poem “Earrings Glow on the Beach” at Lake Michigan 9/2/19 in Kenosha, WI (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix T56 camera; Sepia Tone filter).

See YouTube video of Chicago poet Janet Kuypers reading her poem “Earrings Glow on the Beach” at Lake Michigan 9/2/19 in Kenosha, WI (this video was filmed from a Panasonic Lumix T56 camera; Threshold filter).

See a YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Earrings Glow on the Beach” (written 8/30, on and for National Beach Day) and “Eleven and Two, plus Eight” (for 8/24, Pluto Demoted Day), read from the Janet Kuypers poetry book “Every Event of the Year (Volume Two: July-December)” on 7/23/20 during the Virtual Austin Poetry Society New World Poetry open mic (video from a Panasonic Lumix 2500 camera; posted on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr).

See a Facebook live video stream of Janet Kuypers reading her poems “Earrings Glow on the Beach” (written 8/30, on and for National Beach Day) and “Eleven and Two, plus Eight” (for 8/24, Pluto Demoted Day), read from the Janet Kuypers poetry book “Every Event of the Year (Volume Two: July-December)” on 7/23/20 during the Virtual Austin Poetry Society New World Poetry open mic (this video filmed from a Samsung S9 camera).

Earrings Glow    on the Beach Janet Kuypers 8/30/18, written on National Beach Day Back when I was a little girl, My daddy took me to Las Vegas back in the day, shortly after their dollar slot machines dropped winnings in 80-year old silver dollars. I was too young to gamble, and even though daddy did, when I saw a scantily-clad cocktail waitress hawking trinkets on a tray, I saw long sliver stick earrings with LED lights at the end... so I asked in that high-pitched voice only a little girl could give when asking for something, daddy, of course, obliged. We got out of the desert, and I loved those earrings, no one else had anything like them, so when I joined friends to a cottage in Michigan at a beach on Lake Michigan, for a weekend-long role-playing “Clue” adventure weekend, I had to wear my red LED earrings (even if they didn’t match the Clue character I played). The first night we arrived Once at the cottage along the beach, we all instinctively ran to the sand. Some of the rebellious teenagers smoked their clove cigarettes with red embers burning out on the top of a dune, but I just sat there, happy to coexist with glowing red lights on my earrings instead. The cool thing was that two cool boys approached us to ask what those glowing red lights were they saw -- not the cigarette embers, mind you, but the one-of-a-kind earrings I brought from the desert to this shoreline on the beach. I continued to dig my toes into the sand and smiled, realizing how perfectly so many different elements can come together on a beach like this, even if it was originally only originally coming to play out a Clue mystery. But really, there’s no mystery here when you breathe in the fresh water air, feel the beach sand through your fingers and toes, and look up from those earrings to see hundreds of new stars twinkling back at you in the night sky.

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