Marissa Mullins (Colleen Mullins) is a Southern writer, poet, and photographer residing in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. She is currently the publisher & editor of Serenity Cafe Magazine and a working photographer and graphic designer. She also oversees the Poetry is a Verb! site.

Her work has appeared in numerous national literary magazines since 1992 including ELM (Eureka Literary Magazine), 50+Magazine, San Fernando Poetry Journal, Christian New Age Quarterly, Success magazine, CBS book reviews, and Buckle&. She founded and edited Infinity Forum Magazine (1992-1994) and served as the managing editor for CCEQ (Carolina Christian Education Quarterly) from 1999 to 2001.

Marissa edited the work of numerous writers and authors through the years; and, during “day-jobs” in the cemetery and automotive industries from 2003 to 2018, she wrote business and marketing plans, along with employee handbooks and sales training programs. 

If you’d like your work considered for Serenity Cafe or the Poetry is a Verb! website, please drop me a message below or email me at scmedia620@gmail.com.

Blessings,

Marissa

Influences: Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka, Rainer Rilke, T.S. Elliott, Richard Blanco, CS Lewis,  Sylvia Plath, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Goolrich, Bill Bryson, Nietzsche, ee cummings, Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Vivian Gornick, Ernest Hemingway, Jay Parini, Edwidge Danticat, and many others.

The Meaning of Existence by Les Murray

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, plants, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

In Broken Images by Robert Graves

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images.

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

Flannery

“She would often keep a discreet silence about subjects that mattered to her the most,…. Her very silence was a stolid marker of its depth.”   ~from Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, by Brad Gooch.

 

Some Favorite Quotes

“There are such things as false truths and honest lies.”  ~Gypsy Proverb

“A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.”  – James Joyce

“It’s raining my soul, it’s raining, but it’s raining dead eyes.” – Guillaume Apollinaire

From Aristotle…

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

From Nietzsche…

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.