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Poetry Project Selections for April 2010
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Fragments from Sappho
For our Spring 2010 edition of the Tupelo Press Poetry Project, we had asked you to submit poems that took as their titles or first lines one of several fragments from Sappho (If Not, Winter, Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson, Knopf, 2002.)
This call for poems was a contest, judged by Athena Kildegaard, one of the rotating editors of the Poetry Project, and curated by Michaela Morton. Ms. Kildegaard selected first, second, and third place winners. In addition, she awarded a hand-full of honorable mentions, and selected the balance of poems now published in our new, online edition of the Poetry Project, Sappho as Muse.
As a reminder, you were invited to draw upon the following fragments as inspiration:
- the one with violets in her lap (fragment 21)
- if not, winter (fragment 22)
- no more than the bird with piercing voice (fragment 30)
- but all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty (fragment 31)
- you burn me (fragment 38)
- but I to you of a white goat (fragment 40)
- the doorkeeper's feet are seven armlengths long (fragment 110)
- just now goldsandaled Dawn (fragment 123)
- sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in (fragment 130)
- gold anklebone cups (fragment 192)
Judge Athena Kildegaard has awarded first, second, and third place as follows:
- #1 Lisa McCool-Grime, the one with violets in her lap
- #2 Gayle Elen Harvey, the one with violets in her lap
- #3 Barbara Sabol, Poem with a First Line from a Fragment by Sappho
The following are congratulated as honorable mentions:
- Gyorgyi Voros, No more than the bird with piercing voice
- Michelle Gillett, Parrots Lament
- Pam Bernard, To Piero, on the making of the Brera Altarpiece"
- Pam MacLean, the one with violets in her lap
- Marilyn Annucci, but I to you of a white goat
- Jeanne Emmons, "I Might Sing to You of Spring"
- Cal Freeman, But I to You of a White Goat
- Wayne Lee, the one with violets in her lap
- Jeanne Emmons, "The Forbidden
- Desmond Kon, "baudrillard against matisse"
- Joan Colby, The doorkeepers feet are seven armlengths long
Finally, also with our thanks and congratulations, the following have been selected also for inclusion online:
- Nancy Flynn, "Here We Are, In the Years
- Nicelle Davis, The One with Violets in Her Lap
- Michele Battiste, Gold Anklebone Cups
- Marilyn Annucci, the doorkeepers feet are seven armlengths long
- Sima Rabinowitz, If Not, Winter
- Elisabeth Murawski, The One with Violets in her Lap
- Sam Hollis, But I To You
- Christi Kramer, Just now goldsandeled Dawn
- George McKim, if not
- Ruth Moon Kempher, MEMO: for X, at Tea
- Sonja Livingston, the doorkeepers feet are seven armlengths long (fragment 110)
- Teresa Wyeth, the one with violets in her lap
- Sally Fisher, Gold Anklebone Cups
- Marjorie Rhine, Bucking a Sea-Change"
- Richard Garcia, Sappho
- Gyorgyi Voros, Jornada del Muerto
The winning poems can be read below.
1st Place
the one with violets in her lap
thought about space and how to fill it the air above her thighs called
empty she thought purple thought delicate and flowers
opened with such urgency into the
need of all holes to be filled she thought about
widemouthed women and song broke into
the faces the air once called empty began
vibrating she thought about space and how it fills with
or without her sandals and robes necklaces and crowns and cloaks the flesh that
lets rosy fingers fit
into a space dark and light as the moon is
heavy when full she slept and woke with
room for more filling the space around the unbound
letters were
apple branches
Lisa McCool-Grime has been a featured reader at venues from North Carolina to California, from universities to bars to basements. She worked as a poet-in-residence in North Dakota, receiving a grant in 2008 to teach students ages 8 to 18. In December 2008, she graduated with an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles where her poetry was nominated twice for the AWP Intro Journal Award. Her poetry has appeared in Napalm Health Spa, Writer's Dojo, The Citron Review, Splinter Generation and is forthcoming in the North Dakota Quarterly and Poemeleon.
2nd Place
-----THE ONE WITH VIOLETS IN HER LAP-----
(after Sappho-------------------------------)
Intimate as breath, kisses mauve
and undressing,
her mouth pleads for the suns
drone--- its pleasuring.
Slowly counting
down,
May is almost--- this calms her.
In her lap,
consolation--- so many violets
they will nuzzle.
Petals fall from her---
such a darkness
of bees---
Gayle Elen Harvey was raised in the Utica NY area and has been an artists model,
dental receptionist and for the past 25 years, a hospital office clerk. Shes been awarded
a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellowship and widely published in the
United States, Canada, Great Britain and India.
3rd Place
Poem with a First Line from a Fragment by Sappho
No more than the bird with piercing voice,
this sweep of light across the grass. Evening
quickens. The wood thrush calls down
the last plumes of violet, bruising the
air
beneath the familiar double warbled cry. Though much
is understood about the bending of light, passing
through one medium (say, dimming day) to
another of less velocity (say, a glass;
water)
how is it the light, along with the bird and its sorrow song,
bows, if you will, along some vector, an angling of x
toward a denser y, so that what we perceive
shifts as we look, slant as a fault in the
earth.
Nothing truer than my palm curving the shape of your thirst
and its quenching, as I carry a glass of tap water,
brimming, out through the twilit yard, to where
you sit aslant the purpling
sky.
Everything, even the water in its amber tumbler, all
its immaculate droplets intact, stills and is held by this
tapering half-light, by the pitch of a half-recalled
call, response; the glass, our hands
vanishing
Barbara Sabols poetry and essays have appeared in Public-Republic, Blood Lotus, Tributaries, the Akron Art Museums website and elsewhere. She is a long-practicing speech therapist and amateur naturalist, living near the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in N.E. Ohio with her partner and dogs. She holds degrees in French and Communication Disorders from the Univ. of Massachusetts, and is close to completing her MFA at Spalding University.
Honorable Mention
No more than the bird with piercing voice
do I know what I do when,
pierced myself, I sting.
Tongues barb flies, fixes
in skin. You lay down
your spoon, brood. Broad
wash of regret waters my face.
O give me the map of where
I would be migratory,
drawn by forces
beyond my ken. Give me
voice to join the chorus
of the wordless, calling, cawing
without lament or longing,
inarticulate as gods who also
slap as at mosquitoes, heedless
and insistent for a world the way
will wills it be.
Gyorgyi Voros lives in Roanoke, VA, and teaches at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Her first volume of poems, Unwavering, appeared from Groundwater Press in 2007.
Honorable Mention
Parrots Lament
(from Sappho, Fragment 30)
No more than the bird with piercing voice,
I dont sing or speak. Although my owner
slows his syntax, whistling and coaxing me,
I am a failure at mimicry.
I had a companion once--she escaped
from the hooded cage. I could hear her
hesitation, then her flailing at the walls.
I dont want to leave.
I have my mirror and my bell,
my cuttle bone , the swing.
He fills the little water trough, puts down
shredded paper, hangs the bough of seed.
Sometimes the mirror gives me back
the shape of my exertions. I hang and preen.
I would like to please him more--
force consonants between my tongue and beak,
work the vowels up my throat to say
what he repeats. But how would he distinguish
truth from mockery? Sometimes he lifts me out;
perched on his index finger, his voice is all I need.
Michelle Gillett won the Backwaters Press Poetry Prize for Blinding the Goldfinches, selected by Hayden Carruth and published in 2005. She has won a poetry awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and has recently published in Agenda, Upstreet, Salamander, Calyx, Orion. She received an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Honorable Mention
To Piero, on the making of the Brera Altarpiece
You burn me, though the saints
naked feet are cool on the stone.
Johns fine-fingered hand points to the child, who surely slips from
Marys lap, as she swoons
inward toward an idea.
The perfect egg
of the universe above spawns
centuries, even in this oldest season.
Who could live their lives, so
self-absorbed, gazing with quiet
approval, away from the others,
each toward an unknown fate?
Yet, I hear your measured breathing,
imperative of blood runneling
in the wisdom of your veins, and wonder
for whom do you wait?
Pam Bernard, a poet, painter, editor, and adjunct professor, received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Graduate Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and BA from Harvard University in History of Art. Her many awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, two Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships, the Grolier Prize in Poetry, and a MacDowell Fellowship. She has published three full length collections of poems, the latest of which is a series of poetic narratives about the Great War, entitled Blood Garden: An Elegy for Raymond. Ms. Bernard lives in Walpole, New Hampshire, and teaches creative writing at New Hampshire Institute of Art and River Valley Community College.
Honorable Mention
THE ONE WITH VIOLETS IN HER LAP
Our husbands go into town
for beer, leave us in her garden
where she moves with the grace of familiarity,
brushing leaves gently with her thumbs,
and popping small green offerings
into my mouth.
We squat in the beans.
She as brown as earth
and me, white as the grubs
left dying in buckets at the end of each row.
And twice as hungry.
She tells me how,
in the first years, he would come
to the garden, crouch behind her,
one hand fisted in her hair,
the other gathering her skirt
to take her. Torn each time
between wanting to be rooted here
and her need for light,
she tried to think of him
as new and green.
Only a garden now, she whispers.
In the shade of the corn
she reaches to brush a hair
from my face, changes her mind,
lifts my breast to her mouth instead.
Only when we hear the truck
grinding up the long lane,
do we dress and go in to make supper.
Hodge Podge:
Silky golden cream,
potatoes, round and white,
tender yellow and green beans,
and the salt tang of pearl onions,
not much larger than the buttons
down the front of her dress.
Pam Calabrese MacLean is a Nova Scotia poet and playwright. MacLean has published two books of poetry: Twenty-four Names for Mother (Paper Journey Press 2006) and The Dead Cant Dance (Ronsdale Press 2009). Two of MacLeans plays have been professionally produced.
Honorable Mention
but I to you of a white goat
or a long gait
or a bin of sleet
or an emerald lamb
or a horn of fire
or a small black dog to you
anything
but you to me but I to you
like a game of names
down a line of children
but I to you of a unicorn
or two red beans
or a tub of sleep
or a shoe of rain
or a clock of hands
or a fainting
goat
falling
you to me
Marilyn Annucci is the author of a chapbook, Luck (Parallel Press). Her poems have been published in a variety of print and electronic journals, and you can find recent work online at Umbrella Journal and in Verse Wisconsins summer and fall online issues. Marilyn is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Honorable Mention
I Might Sing to You of Spring
but I to you of a white goat
sing, a goat with crooked legs
and horn buds like the knobs
of new potatoes, and the hunger
for a milky teat. My song
the cry of one who sees
her first sunrise, or first feels
the melt of winters ice swift
past her hooves, or startles at
the call of the raven in the bare
limbs of the cottonwood.
I might sing to you of robins,
worms hanging limp in their beaks,
the easy, yellow-green sway of
willow branches, the tight curl
of lambswool and the bounding
meadows greening up in April.
But I am coarse and eager.
So I to you of a white goat sing,
one bleating goat, and a road,
muddy, soft, ready for rutting.
Jeanne Emmons third poetry collection, The Glove of the World, won the Readers Choice Award from Backwaters Press in 2006. Her work has won the Comstock Review Prize and the James Hearst Prize, among others, and has most recently appeared in Ecotone, South Carolina Review, and Alaska Quarterly.
Honorable Mention
But I to You of a White Goat
Stuck in the nettles around
The raspberries, you twisting
Dials in hope of a song
And hearing these bleats
Rising like heat from the summer
Asphalt. West Detroit
Is no believable setting
But a warren slopes away
From Warren Avenue.
Downhill is a difficulty un-
Dreamed by the river. Heels over
Head, briar-sliced
Legs, a septic smell wafting.
Here you had told me
I would find the lank-legged creature.
Here you told me
There was water.
Cal Freeman was born and raised in west Detroit. He received his MFA from Bowling Green State University in 2004. That year Terrance Hayes selected his manuscript for the Devine Poetry Fellowship. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Nimrod, The Cortland Review, Drunken Boat, Bayou, Commonweal, among several other publications.
Honorable Mention
the one with violets in her lap
the one whose hem slips up to her hips
as she shifts in her wicker seat
the one with finch crown cheeks
and fingers tightened on a broken stick
biting her lip
tea grown tepid
the one who notices cracks in the plaster
smells the neighbors new-turned soil
whose socks hang on her chairback
feet rest atop her clogs
the one shivering in her sundress
humming a fragment of song
spies a bicycle in the distance
lets her thighs just unclench
--After Sappho
Wayne Lee grew up in Washington state and now lives in Santa Fe, NM. His poems have appeared in New Millennium, The Ledge, The California Quarterly, New Mexico Poetry Review, New England Anthology of Poets, Steam Ticket, Poets Against the War, The Floating Bridge Anthology and other journals and anthologies. His chapbooks Doggerel & Caterwauls: Poems Inspired by Cats and Dogs, and Twenty Poems from the Blue House (co-authored with his wife, Alice Morse Lee), were published by Whistle Lake Press. Lees awards include the Emily Dickinson Award in Poetry, the William Stafford Award in Poetry, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Writers Digest Poetry Award and the Charles Proctor Humor Award.
Honorable Mention
The Forbidden
The doorkeepers feet are seven armlengths long,
and his calves block the entrance, while I, unremarkable,
am a mere inchworm folding and unfolding toward you.
Though his handbreadth is measured in yardsticks,
though the cavern of his navel gapes above the lintel,
I will somehow enter, a beetle of love, a termite of desire.
His shoulders sag with the weight of his great head.
He crouches, wedges himself tight against the doorposts.
He groans, weary of defending, sick with possession.
I own nothing, am free, a firefly pulsing on and off.
And if he does not surrender the door, I will be the bee
at the window, come at morning to suck on the sweet
golden dregs of your tea. At night, a soft, blind moth
beating these powdery wings against your screen.
Jeanne Emmons third poetry collection, The Glove of the World, won the Readers Choice Award from Backwaters Press in 2006. Her work has won the Comstock Review Prize and the James Hearst Prize, among others, and has most recently appeared in Ecotone, South Carolina Review, and Alaska Quarterly.
Honorable Mention
baudrillard against matisse
but I to you of a white goat at the turn of a decade
hands against flesh still warm twill, to the touch
dent where a heart should be, zinc sounding
through working-arm shadows;
stay the status quo by me, narrow, edges
cut off at elbows, its the feeling of a curve
hinged architrave, its frieze rail to pin
no one to a name, the muntin to say:
what else, rough-face mirror?
where is the blue-eared manx, its soft scratching
down at back, bottom panel
an open teak? his single finger reaching
out for a button for a longer chord;
airfoil, squall, a door ajar
as if for odd breath, as if exonerated; shuttling
stile masking, holding space grabbing chairs.
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingd has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. His work in lifestyle journalism saw him covering stories in Australia, Cambodia, France, Hong Kong, and Spain. A recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award, Desmond has been invited to read at the Singapore Writers Festival and Prague International Poetry Festival. His poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, Blackbird, Confrontation, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and Seneca Review, among others. Also working in clay, Desmond is presently sculpting three ceramic pieces to commemorate the birth centennials of Robert Fitzgerald, Jos Lezama Lima and Charles Olson for his Potter Poetics Collection. His pieces have been housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.
Honorable Mention
The doorkeepers feet are seven armlengths long.
The door itself towers to admit
The oversized gods you needed then,
Snatched skyward into constellations
You could not fondle, could not sacrifice
The way you wanted, knife at the throat,
Blood in the vessel, heart in the hand.
Stone monoliths, we find ages hence
Suggest how large was your desire
To bless yourselves, to offer up
Whatever the priests declared.
Those big mesmerizing stories.
Joan Colby is the author of five books of poetry, over 850 published poems, recipient of a Fellowship in Literature and two Literary Awards from the Illinois Arts Council along with many other awards.
Selected
Here We Are, In the Years
And on Fridays shed be there. And on Wednesday not at all.
Just casually appearing from the clock across the hall
John Cale, Paris 1919
No more than the bird with piercing voice
to greet me, floozy this morning on waking
no Little Miss Sunshine here, tra la la
hold the folderol. Anything to prevent
my remembering flush from cooling off,
after last night, such gypsied dreams.
I dont seek clarity. Instead, I slap the words,
alphabetical, certain that their insistence,
after all these years, will give voice.
I head to the shower, listen for the creak:
1938s pipes that gurgle then burp
like a cappella frogs in the gravel driveway dip.
My heart has a visitor, one more mendicant
who fears which genie long-bottled will emerge.
I am a long train trailing a debutantes gown.
Every dawn, Ill glide, dust you a path
on this inlaid mahogany. Inspect my nails,
each one is missing its rising moon.
I am the renegade, the sister who veered,
cupboards closed, piled with the chipped
and ill-fitting, every door hinged with regret.
Your message arrives with the sun and after?
Awake! This is the deal: I can write a tale
of the exile each day. Any blowback that starts,
well, neither of us should get shook.
No more false fronts and, with you, no need
for lie. I walk on my toes, muttering
even as I swallow my thoughts. To begin:
Let me tell you in words, such helpful, helpless
words, the ones I cross out and re-pen,
over and over. This time. And, again.
Nancy Flynn hails from the coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania and now lives in Portland, Oregon. A scribbler since elementary school, she won her first literary prize in 1965 when her essay Our Friend, the Moon took second place in the Junior Project Competition sponsored by the Educational ABCs of Industry in Niagara Falls, New York. Her writings since received the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in regional and national publications; her 2007 poetry chapbook, The Hours of Us, was nominated for an Oregon Book Award. A story, Cut Off, featured in the VoiceCatcher 4 anthology of Portland womens writing has been nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize. A former university administrator, she now writes and edits for writersdojo.org where her blog, Apostrophe, attempts to find the meaning of punctuation and life. Her website is www.nancyflynn.com.
Selected
The One with Violets in her Lap
brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.
Anne Carson, If Not, Winter
[Ground is swollen with rain.] [Earth moves
like honey through fingers.][I dig towards light
a glint sinkingI am half buried when my
fingers finally net a coin.]
Pity [how mud will matt a surface. I suckle
the small disk of metal and spit a reflection
of sun into my palm. Fist around glow,]
trembling, [I pull myself
from the bog. Lying in heat, layers of dry
dirt pull at my body.] [I am a thing about
to lose itselfI am loose] flesh. By now
old age [has stretched
me from my bones. A huskI am] covers
[of a scent that reminds me of her. I have lost
everything but want. The] flies in pursuit
[of impotent pollen
are excited by my lackby my humility.
There is nothing] noble [about] taking [fare
for Hells rivers from a gutter, but I did it
to keep my memory of her
from slipping into streams of Lethe. Flies]
sing to us [exilessing me a dirgesing
for] the one with violets in her lap [with legs
morphed into a bed for seed.
My lower self is a hope separate from desire
but my arms are] mostly [prayers reaching for
herthey are what refuses to learn how prayer]
goes astray.
Nicelle Davis lives in Southern California with her husband James and their son J.J. She runs a free online poetry workshop at: nicelledavis.wordpress.com.
Selected
Gold Anklebone Cups
Do not sever
the hum from her
throat. The kerf isnt
the only loss
and your influx
isnt worth either.
Notice, instead,
how her wristbone
crystalizes,
how her arch glints,
how her thin, gold
anklebone cups
the brine when she
wades the backwaters,
daylight washing
away. And that
low-throated hum
keeps the creatures
at large, at bay.
Michele Battiste is the author of the full-length collection Ink for an Odd Cartography (Black Lawrence Press, 2009) and the chapbooks Slow the Appetite Down (Spire Press, 2009) and Raising Petra (Pudding House, 2007). Her poems have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Pool, Mid-American Review, Poetry International, The Laurel Review, and Harpur Palate among other journals and most recently on Verse Daily. She is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a Jerome Foundation Travel grant, and an AWP Intros Award. Nomadic by default, she currently lives in Boulder, Colorado where she teaches, studies and misses the East Coast, especially Rose and Joe's Bakery in Astoria. You can visit Michele at www.michelebattiste.com.
Selected
the doorkeeper's feet are seven armlengths long
He is both skiff
and rudder
both sail
and wind
Step in
hold fast
His arms are seven doors wide
His heart, seven leagues deep
Marilyn Annucci is the author of a chapbook, Luck (Parallel Press). Her poems have been published in a variety of print and electronic journals, and you can find recent work online at Umbrella Journal and in Verse Wisconsins summer and fall online issues. Marilyn is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Selected
If, not winter
when you forget why
you chose the prairie
remember this
that bowl of a sky
is your lost family
turned upside down
scattered birds of prey
luring you to the horizons
of a limitless passion
for deprivation:
what is this small frozen penitence
(once and always, winter)
in the face of
the delicious hungering north?
Sima Rabinowitz is the author of The Jewish Fake Book (Elixir Press, 2004) and Murmuration (New Michigan Press, 2006). Her prose and poetry have appeared recently or will soon appear in Water-Stone Review, Hamilton Arts and Letters, and Sentence. She lives in the Bronx, New York.
Selected
The One with Violets in her Lap
She thinks
shes the cats miaow,
my fair lady. Forget
about the bridge
falling down. That parts
old hat. Shes the sort
who steals for sport
the plums I want.
I cannot forgive her
the flute player, hot
and available.
No summers day, she.
More a red-tailed hawk
with beady little eyes
the color of silt.
Id put her on a ship
leaving Crete
in stormy weather!
Elisabeth Murawski is the author of Zorbas Daughter, awarded the 2010 May Swenson Poetry Award, forthcoming from Utah State University Press. Publications include The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, et al. A Hawthornden fellow in 2008.
Selected
But I To You
Of a white goat.
The smooth glide
through hide & flesh.
The celery snap
of neck bone.
Slick blood
river pooling
on ivory.
The ritual of love
and music.
Fingers linger
in waiting
for the push,
hammer down.
Felt hard.
Taught trio
vibrating in near
perfect unison.
Sam Hollis is a student at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studies Anthropology and will graduate in May 2010. He plays classical and jazz piano. This is his first poetry submission to any non-University publication. He is 25 years old.
Selected
Just now goldsandaled Dawn
Unravel red sequins, embroidered flax
Language is the dress of thought Go Naked!
Or pull the whole wardrobe onto the bed and burst out in song.
In morning, she would not enter the house dew, wet grass on feet.
Now this is no excuse: on the other side the Beloved waits.
Another image: the body torn. Bread having sopped up wine; all ripped and spilled.
Re-stitch the robe.
Stitch elegant lilies opening, songbirds and lovers wrapped in ivy.
Christi Kramer was born in Northern Idaho, received an MFA in poetry from George Mason University and is pursuing a PhD at University of British Columbia, considering poetry and traditions of reconciliation, while facilitation writing circles for children exiled by war.
Selected
if not
if not, winter
then
a false start
of spring
with reckless
gestures of pink
luminous afternoons
that spill into kitchens
that breathe themselves
through open squares of lung
in the sing song warble of sun
the fractured skin of trees
the carved air of birds
a lingering sadness
folds itself
into the memory of leaves
the sharp curls of wind
the falsetto moonlight
George McKim comes to the art of poetry, recently, from the art of painting. He has been painting for thirty years and holds an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing. He has worked as a graphic artist for twenty years. George is one of the ten winners of the 2010 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition. His poetry has been accepted for publication, or has been published in Simply Haiku, Rust and Moth Journal, Hanging Moss Journal, ChicagoPoetry.com - Cram 6, Crossing Rivers into Twilight Journal, Everyday Poets and Everyday Poets Anthology.
Selected
MEMO: for X, at Tea
The doorkeeper's feet
are seven arm-length's
long but, eunuch, he's
miniscule, a minor
complication. Be cool.
Be swift. Beloved.
Ruth Moon Kempher owns and operates Kings Estate Press in St. Augustine, Florida. Their latest publication was her Chronicles of Madam X, in late 2009.
Selected
the doorkeeper's feet are seven armlengths long (fragment 110)
which is how we all got in;
a crack to him, a river to us
were of such inconsequence, he didnt see us steal
into the temple, where hed hidden his gold, his horses,
and the fairest of his twenty-five brides, we worked fast
to find the right one, and in the end, armfuls of black hair, moonlight,
and the scent of ginger gave her away, and our giant lily
let us in through
an eardrum
and we slept, our entire party,
curled like babies
in the wide blue places
behind her eyes.
Sonja Livingstons work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, AGNI, Cream City Review, the Iowa Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. A poetic memoir, Ghostbread, won the AWP Award for Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press. Her work appears in several texts on writing and has been honored with fellowships from NYFA, the Vermont Studio Center, the Deming Fund, as well Pushcart Prize nominations.
Selected
the one with violets in her lap
Before dishes, almost licked clean
were stacked in the sink
before warm bread was spread
with lavender colored jelly, and before
mother served piles of stew
on blue, chipped plates,
before hands were washed
of dirt and blood
from the last chore done
she was the one sitting
with violets in her lap,
listening
to the cries of rabbits,
the almost silent
whoosh of the axe,
the thud of metal on wood.
Teresa Wyeth lives on a farm in New Ross, IN. She is a farmer, painter and poet currently attending IUPUI in Indianapolis. She has had poetry displayed on IndyGo buses, been published in Maize, the Indiana Writers Center journal, and participates in many readings and slams throughout the Indianapolis area.
Selected
Gold Anklebone Cups
Guy walks up pops
legs out thup thup
thup thup flips
table upright next
thing bones roll
under the cups or
not, slides them
cupping his hands palming
a bone no doubt wags
a cup so you hear
a knock.
Bills down wrinkled
pile Five bucks!
spots a cop pockets
the cash cups bones walks
fast table legs jut but
he knocks them back just
a guy walking. His own bones
good as gold.
Sally Fishers poems have appeared in the Threepenny Review, Margie, Field, Poetry East, Mid-American Review, and many other magazines and anthologies. She works in New York City as a freelance writer, editor, and print production consultant.
Selected
Bucking a Sea Change
Bucking, though a potentially dangerous disobedience when
under saddle, is a natural aspect of horse behavior. (Wikipedia)
But I to you of a white goat
Kept talking, laughing at its nimble antics
As the children squealed at the feel
Of its nibbles on their proffered palms.
It was talk of the goat or succumb:
To the cuffs of your shirt turned
So rakishly back against your rough sweater,
Its striped wool that no one else
But me would find a fetish,
To the feathers of dark hair falling back
Into your eyes
After a comb of your hand,
To the way I might
Become a sleek-skinned selkie and slip
Into a landscape rich and strange,
Into the sea-depths,
Into your eyes.
.
So I to you of a white goat
Kept talking,
Building a sea wall of words
To keep the waves at bay,
Watching the white goat
Make a fool of its greedy hunger.
Marjorie Rhine is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she teaches literature and writing and directs the Honors Program.
Selected
Sappho
If not, winterSappho is talking in her sleep again. She is dreaming of Egypt. She is dreaming of bandages. She says, Angels look like normal people. Together we step inside a bubble. It takes us under the Aegean Sea. Its supposed to be the back yard behind the house where I grew up. Sapp