January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lorraine Marwood is a Five Islands press poet and has two children’s books of poetry published as well as a verse novel with Walker ‘Ratwhiskers and Me’. Her latest verse novel ‘Star Jumps’ will be released in June 2009. This novel really encompasses the influences of her poetry, the rural landscape and the surprising detail, all a way to celebrate life in words. Lorraine also writes poetry strategies and is available for workshops across all age levels. www.lorrainemarwood.com
Releasing
Her pelargoniums, her little clucks of treasure
strong square ooze like catspray
fans of flowers like dragon wings
a wintering of wooden shelves
step laddering the back door alcove.
I came into her shuttered world,
I could call her grandmother.
She prodded, poked, admonished, preached
every word a lesson to decipher
a frost crunch world where shyness
was fashioned into stalactites that sharded
straight for heart.
She locked love up like Easter chocolate
turned pale with mothballs-
but here I offer
the sizzle of sausages
the sharing of her soft feathery
double bed, twin trunks up on the wardrobe top
smocked cushions
a cold electric fire
and Grimm’s fairy tales
signed with love from Nanny
bought at EJ Brown’s bookshop.
I have blown to dandelion seed her love of words
not restrained them with dire consequences-
wood smoke and finches
arch over my back door
and a tiny skink lizard
races over the melted frost
mid morning.
I come into her sunlit world.
Salt Desert Donkey
We visited once on these salt desert plains
her wooden sixty year old house
only tree shade around,
desolation of farming inheritance.
She kept a donkey when all the other
farming wives kept chooks or ducks
or snails in their gardens.
She fed grey ears and braying,
softness in the salt-grit landscape.
The donkey moved around the periphery paddock,
looking down on a barbed wire garden,
stunted irises and under the tankstand
a scraggle of marguerites.
And in the autumn when paspallum reared like tiger snakes,
she mowed the measured square of her backyard lawn,
tossing the grey sleet of grass
into the donkey’s paddock.
Neighbours whispered about the
useless animal, its awkward shape
how salt eats more than pasture and trees,
laps at the very foundation of wooden houses
shearing sheds, windmills,
but this farmer’s
wife knows the seawater drink
of their gossip and reasons
that a donkey is future insurance
for salt desert trekking.
Celestial
Between tractor lights
and the first tenting pegs of sky
he looks out to the night
liquid,
deep blue
with a scarf of cloud.
Stars trace the outline
of huge celestial tent,
incubator to his solitary thoughts.
It’s the one intense time of the year
when his temporal strand of humanity
feels the huge canopy of the unknown.
It’s not that he’s extraordinary,
he’s one of many; a time -worn
quantity of farmers out sowing the world’s
granary. It seems to him puny, slow,
awkward. The power of the tractor
sidles away to a cough. There above him
a star shoots, light cutting down through
the ridges of sky. He feels he could
put out his hand, squeeze the light’s shower
compress it like clay, tattoo his fingerprints,
but his reach is minuscule.
The fireworks spit and finish,
he turns the tractor and ploughs
another circumference of the paddock
he gulps in the night air,
believes he tastes stardust on his tongue.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Carol Jenkins is a visual artist, writer and publisher living in Sydney, Australia, you can find bits of her work online on her blog Show Me The Treasure. Her first book of poetry Fishing in the Devonian was published in 2008 by Puncher & Wattmann. Her publishing company River Road Press produces audio CDs of Australian poetry.
Mulberries
(written on the occasion of seeing dried white mulberries in Shaza’s Persian Groceries.)
Somewhere I am in a mulberry tree,
tucked into the green skirt that nearly drapes
the ground. I am wearing blue shorts
and a white top, a two-piece set made
of terry-towelling, and on the top, appliquéd,
are green leaves and under this calyx suspended,
free, are terry towelling strawberries, that are delicious
but inedible and then, to one side, and then another
splatters of dark mulberry juice, indelible.
Spice Trade
Your amalgam, a pestling of hard seeds
and dry leaf, has vanilla moments
not plain but sweet, tempered down with constant
coriandering, enlivened with words of sumac,
heat of chili on the tongue, the sharp
and pungent turns galangal-ish,
and your barberry tang that raises shiver
from the well below my solar plexus,
shakes up taste buds on my torso, before it sinks
into my sub-continent of spice.
I offer back a citric acid discipline,
the honey bee’s diasporas, mycelia of salty plums
that spring backwards from the tongue
what you never thought to think, as day dissolves,
about the ragged illegalities of juniper
or might you ask, before all the aromatics
do some limbo in ras el hanout, about the rosehips?
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Heather Taylor Johnson moved from America to Adelaide in 1999. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, is a poetry editor for Wet Ink magazine, and the author of the poetry collection Exit Wounds. She reviews poetry and other artforms for various publications. She has a husband, three children under six and a feisty pup, and finds the bathtub a welcome office space.
Shovelling Snow
There is subtlety in a morning snow
silent from the picture window and I’m curled cat-like
on my favourite couch, hot chocolate in my favourite mug,
warming my two morning hands, contemplating objects hidden
covered and coated with winter;
that lump that grew beneath her not yet forty skin.
Last night the phone call.
I spend the day in sweater and sweats and knitted socks
typing away at what I don’t know (death buried beneath the snow?)
because I want insight and closure
and most of the time I sit, staring at the foreign snow,
waiting to grow numb.
At three o’clock my computer rests,
a second cup of chocolate waits
while the hanging sun, timid, waits
to drop below the layered roofs
and the stewing of moose sausage waits,
the uncorking of the South Australian cab sav too
-because we wish to toast her in her own native flavour
and Canadian red wine lacks the complexity we are after.
If only I could find my couch and sit in the silence
of the late afternoon snow
but the driveway’s impatient now, covered and coated
with piles and hours of fresh white subtlety.
Christ but there is no subtlety in shovelling snow
and it does not dare to wait.
Tomorrow they will bury her in the dry, cracked
summer-drought soil, her not-yet forty years,
and as they comfort one another in their daylight despair
this house will be quiet with sleep,
not conscious of how we long for the sun.
The midnight will bring more snow and it will cover
my driveway once more, it will cover the tracks of our daily lives,
it will cover the warmth of the deep underground.
Spaces
I suggest something different from longing,
entirely separate from belonging.
I propose spaces.
Not holes or gaps
implying absence or worse
emptiness
but spaces as places
between what we know.
The big sky
my mother’s face
pizza sauce served thickly.
‘Awesome’ ‘cookie’ ‘garbage can’
my brother’s crooked eye.
SUVs and mountain streams
a bluebird’s song a hummingbird’s wing, tall glasses of 2% milk
my father’s towering body.
Vineyards
combustion heaters
saying ‘partner’ rather than ‘husband’
and sometimes stopping
to remember
he has an accent.
Port dolphins
gumtree sky
the footy the ocean
ubiquitous meat pies.
The space I am suggesting
between here and there
is not so big—
it’s enormous.
before noon
brick backyard
water bottle and phone:
or ‘my birthday poem’
The international dateline confuses calendars and friends
so yes, they all have an excuse.
Here’s to calling card expirations
and the baby’s almost due
and I didn’t get home until late last night,
and here’s to my forever forgiving simply just forgot
but you must know this:
that on this particularly sentimental day,
that here so far from the reaching Blue Ridge
I am waiting telephone on table
brick backyard.
This day is hot
like the summer tried to sneak away,
got caught red sweaty-handed
and spilled all over my body,
and on this day I wish the scent
of the ocean three kilometres away,
for my son to sleep a full two hours,
to tan myself bare
thinly layered sunscreened skin
wisteria my thick fortress.
Sweet family and those pictures of party hats
children with vague names
brown and green corduroy clothes
of the mid 70s we all seemed to wear,
remember this day
colour me into your latest photo
and stick it on the fridge.
Undomesticated university girls,
the river dudes with holey jeans,
my three-year tangle mistake
who shared my tiny bed,
our drinks were always raised to the camera’s lens,
so raise your drinks now, beyond your horizon;
it’s midnight your time
and I’m before noon water bottle ready.
I wish for the dj playing soul
to keep on spinning til the day is done
as I wish for accents like my own
because nothing speaks more of home
than an emphasized r at the end of my name,
the telephone and a strong memory
of an endlessly wooded grass backyard
and the reaching Blue Ridge in the distance.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Martin Edmond lives and writes in Sydney. His most recent book is The Supply Party: Ludwig Becker on the Burke & Wills Expedition
Three Lakes
My mind takes a holiday and my body, faithful and indissoluble accompanist, goes along for the ride. We circumambulate a sacred lake above which the mountain floats white on a white sky like something that cannot be yet is. Later I drive around another profaned by corpses from an ancient massacre; about the first we walk in perfect clarity, the second I round in a miasma of confusion and get lost: body and mind crying blindly out for soul. Had I forgotten there is a third in which all of our complexities are mired? It is like this in all the old places. New memories rise up with the alarm cries of birds and say: Go! Depart this place! Come here not as you are but as you were or would be! Nevermore! Etc. The bush fizzing with tui in the glory of the morning. Light glinting from the leaves and from the swift mirror of another lake, across which the once baleful cone now looks almost benign. As if the echo of catastrophe can only linger for so long before a sleepy domesticity of sun and shadow prevails; as if the days outlast the nights. There’s nobody here but me and the birds: paradise ducks honking as they swim out past the landing place. Black swans spreading their wings in alarm as they stagger clumsy through the mud to water’s edge then instantly transform to nonpareils of elegance and grace. Little blue ducks that were here last time I came as well. The wordless fascination of wordless things. That silence in which all other silences inhere. I can almost touch it—there, past the weir, past the raupo, past that greeny slope and past the sky. In the visitor’s centre the man from Tuhourangi is thinking of giving up his curatorial duties and going to Port Hedland to drive a road train. Port Hedlands, he says. Headlands maybe. Uncorrected. What is interred here laments still in his eyes. It is written on a plaque beside the road: They lay scattered in the deep night, the intense night; the sorrow and grief a tattoo of pain on my skin; and tears stream from my eyes for my dear departed ones. I show him the photo of the man I’m interested in. That’s one of my great great uncles, he says, but I don’t know much about him. And that little he does not say. Rewiri not Rawiri. Bare feet not boots as I had always thought. The quizzical look of one who has died and been reborn: we are not separate and distinct he says or seems to say. Mind body and soul: three lakes with one source. Turbulent or calm. Fathomless. Full of green bones. Or crayfish. Or the massive weedy trunks of trees. In those black depths you may drown. Fall through the earth all the way to China. Become engulfed in tendrils of fear, the terror of forgetting, that dreadful sink of longing. Although I wanted to I did not go through the dark doorway to the buried village. There was an ache in my soul as I drove away, bereft, unsatisfied: like a spirit hungering for blood so it can speak what it knows. And this was not some kind of possession from outside, this was me. Us. Mind body soul. Spirit. And then I knew we must go there again another time.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Cameron Lowe lives in Geelong and works as a plasterer. His writing has appeared in Island, Meanjin, The Age & The Best Australian Poetry 2007 (UQP). Throwing Stones at the Sun, a chapbook of his poems was published by Whitmore Press in 2005. He is currently undertaking postgraduate study at The University of Melbourne.
Fins
for Alice
Deferring to wind & water a sort of swimming
begins, an allowance for flotsam on the tides of memory,
ambit lights glowing in the midnight depths,
slivers of silver teasing at the edges of sight.
To be alone, then,
moonlight playing upon the sea’s skin.
Thinking scales, a child’s game of spindly fins,
the past rising toward its surface of familiars,
the things we are, in this darkness,
& the things we are not,
the dried thing we found on the tide line,
going a little green about the gills.
There will always be this gentle stirring,
this need to hold onto something
even as it changes shape, the little fish’s lullaby,
or the siren song amid the storm,
swimming in a music that breaks upon no shore.
Breathing
‘at the shores of the afternoon’
Nick Riemer
Between painted lips,
or deeper inside the body,
closer to the chest’s cavity,
listening to her swimsuit swelling,
fingers a clutch of leaves
swaying in the summer breeze,
hands smoothly-shaped stones,
the diaphragm contracting,
even now that eyes are closed.
Seashells, she might say suddenly,
half-asleep in the sun, dreaming
perhaps, of distant, pebbled shores,
little waves rising,
crumbling, repeating again & again,
meddling with memory, the map
of her back itself an ocean,
glistening with oil,
under the long echoing blue sky.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Gina Forberg is an elementary school teacher in Westport, Connecticut. She received her Masters of Arts Creative Writing at Manhattanville College. Her work has appeared in The New Delta Review, The Mochila Review, Slant Magazine, Blueline Press, Squaw Valley Review, Anderbo Magazine,
The Turn
Maybe there is gratitude in the map
quest that steered us wrong, that allowed
us to meet our mate when we missed
the church, that prevented the accident
at mile 54. Perhaps we found our dream
house, a new favourite restaurant.
What if we returned to the simple scribble
on the page, the loops, curves of a writer’s
hand, the elegance of slant, the enjambment
of words. I’d like to believe he is
intrigued by the white space, cares less
about cross-outs, erasures, knows not
what direction he is going. For us
to worry about diction, syntax,
punctuation is to misplace the emotion,
to resist the turn we need to make.
The starts, the stops are what drive
our engines. The setting aside restores us.
If we are willing to lose ourselves
in the extra miles we may be surprised
at our destination. If we are lucky,
a reader will follow close behind.
The Conditions and Events of The Winter Olympic Games as a Metaphor for Sex
i.
Snowfall must be sufficient enough to guarantee beyond question a heavy cover
during the prelimary practice.
ii.
Altitude should be sufficient to guarantee snowfall without unduly affecting the
respiration of the athletes.
iii.
If you are going to be a skiier choose freestyle. It has no restrictions.
iv.
It is important for a woman to use her hips during the turns in the downhill slalom.
v.
In classic freestyle, skiiers use the traditional straight-striding technique and do not
deviate from the parallel tracks.
vi.
The word “hockey” derives itself from the French word “hocquet” which refers to
crooked stick.
vii.
Skaters must wear rubber caps to reduce the amount of wind resistance.
viii.
In the luge there is no rule that says a doubles team must comprise members of the
same sex, but traditionally, men have ridden together with the larger man lying on top
for a more aerodynamic fit.
ix.
The luge event is designed to reward consistency, endurance and ability to withstand
pressure, particularly on the second day.
x.
In curling, the stone moves toward a series of concentric circles. The object is to get
the stone as close to the centre of the circle as possible.
xi.
In the biathalon relay each team member has two firing sequences and is allowed
three extra bullets to hit five targets.
xii.
Location changes every two years so make sure the conditions are conducive to your
specified event.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Weam Namou was born in Baghdad, Iraq as a minority Christian, and came to America at age ten. The author of three novels, she studied poetry in Prague and screenwriting at MPI (Motion Picture Institute of Michigan). She is also the co-founder and president of IAA (Iraqi Artists Association). Her articles and poetry has appeared in national and international publications. http://www.pw.org/content/weam_namou
A Childhood in Iraq
Sun shines over a mélange of
green grass and white snow,
like a lime flavored slurpee.
Snow in rarely detected in Baghdad.
Through the window a squirrel
passes by, nibbles at the cereal
I’ve left for it on the deck.
Pets are not encouraged in Iraq.
A lunch of hot tea and a cold slice
of pepperoni pizza I prepare for me,
without removing the pepperoni.
Pork is not halal in the Arabic world.
I listen to the poetic Quranic verses on TV
even though I belong to a Christian minority
who still speak Aramaic, called the Chaldeans.
They’re being persecuted in their native land as we speak.
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the Worlds…
the imam leads a prayer
I remember the paper bag of baby green apples
my father used to bring home for us.
My younger brother and I tied
their stems to a string,
treated the apples like yoyos.
We had no toys back then, nor swings.
We built play houses out of cardboard boxes
pretended pillows were our dolls,
pots and utensils our musical instruments.
In Iraq, today, children can’t afford to be that simple.
Didn’t need anyone to read to us a bedtime story
aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors,
were our heroes and villains.
Now, terrorists and gangs rule that part of the earth.
America
I talk about you, as many others do,
sticking labels such as arrogant and gullible
over your name, like stamps over a large Christmas package.
You dress me with possibilities,
I try on this and that outfit of different colors and sizes,
meanwhile focusing on your limitations.
You do not reprimand me for my verbal thoughts,
rather, you listen, weigh the options and consider
whether what I have to say is worthy of action.
Oftentimes, I even receive applause
for pointing out your negativities and idiocies.
In return, you remain true to the First Amendment you’ve provided.
You’ve allowed me to take a deep look at your weaknesses
and in turn caused me to appreciate your strength and integrity.
That’s real balance, the yin and yang, of our planet.
While I love the country of my birth, of Iraq,
where I was blessed with the best childhood,
I must admit, had I remained there, as an adult,
Freedom of Speech is something I may never have experienced.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
A dual Australian-Irish citizen, Nathanael O’Reilly was born in Warrnambool and raised in Ballarat, Brisbane and Shepparton. He has lived in England, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine and the United States, where he currently resides. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Antipodes, Postcolonial Text, Transnational Literature, Prosopisia, Blackmail Press and Southern Ocean Review.
The Hills of Bendigo
For Sean Scarisbrick
We spent the summer of ninety-two
In the hills of Bendigo
Living in a colonial house
Replete with a croquet lawn,
A ballroom, servant’s quarters,
A wine cellar, an in-ground pool
And a deep, dark verandah
Overlooking an acre of grounds
Scattered with pine needles,
Stone benches and rose bushes.
Home from uni on summer holidays,
We lived on my parent’s charity.
After sleeping past midday
In a room with burgundy velvet curtains
And foot-thick stone walls,
Days were spent swimming in the pool
Seven steps and a leap from our beds,
Reading Eliot, Salinger and Hardy
In the shade on the verandah,
Writing long letters to girls
We thought we knew and loved,
Listening to U2, Van Morrison,
And Hunters & Collectors, always
Getting a kick out of the line
“Way out back in Bendigo.”
When the heat was bearable
We walked over the hills
Along winding goat-track streets
Left over from the goldrush,
Discovering tiny pubs,
No more than front rooms
Of miner’s cottages,
Occupied by old blokes
In op-shop three-piece suits
Perched precariously
On vinyl bar stools.
Old Jimmy fished a battered
Harmonica from his waistcoat
Pocket, shook out the saliva
And puffed out a wheezy tune,
His narrow shoulders hunching
As the condensation slid
Down the side of his pot of VB.
Some days we walked to the mall,
After passing the oval, the Art Gallery,
The high school and the park,
Browsed countless racks of CDs
We couldn’t afford at Brash’s,
Left our sweaty fingerprints
On Thrasher and Rolling Stone
Under the disapproving glare
Of the Chinese newsagent,
Took refuge in the Public Library
Where we flipped through LPs,
Discovering Klaus Wunderlich
And His Amazing Pop Organ Sound.
Evenings were spent at home
Drinking my parents’ wine,
Eating thick slabs of cheese
Grilled on toast while watching
Day-night cricket matches on telly.
Or, if the Austudy hadn’t run out,
Drinking Carlton Draught downtown
In the Shamrock Hotel or the Rifle Brigade,
Playing pool and the jukebox,
Bullshitting about the great things
We would do after finishing uni,
What we would do for a living,
Where we would live,
Where we would go on holidays,
Which girls we would sleep with.
At night we wandered through the hills
Drinking from the silver bladder
Ripped from a box of Coolabah Riesling,
Unable to sleep in the January heat.
We took turns waiting on the swings
In the park across from the Milk Bar,
While you or I made reverse-charge
Calls from a Telecom phone box
With shattered glass and AC/DC graffiti.
Afterwards, we went back to the house
For more grilled cheese on toast,
More chilled wine, and conversations
That lasted into the early hours
And echo through the years.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Born in 1963, a Hindu in Malaysia, Anushka Anastasia Solomon left for the United States as a teenager to study journalism. She returned to Malaysia with a B.A (Creative Writing/Education), envisioning change of the race and religion based Malaysian system of Education. Her poem, “13 Ways of Looking at Malaysia” inspired by Wallace Stevens, which appears in Asia Literary Review Autumn 2008, articulates that vision. The Malaysian government, then and now, frowns upon her ideas. In 1998, due to intolerable family violence and persecution after her mother’s premature death, Anushka, her husband, Ben Solomon, and son David Marshall converted to Christianity, fled Malaysia and immigrated to the United States.
The author of two poetry chapbooks, Please, God, Don’t Let Me Write Like A Woman, (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and The Hindu and The Punk, (Pudding House Press 2009), Anushka’s work is featured by Amnesty International at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scotland, 2007, 2008 and 2009. She lives in beautiful Evergreen, Colorado. (www.atthewindow.us)
Recipe for Success –Slumdog Millionaire
I buy the Bollywood look in Wal-Mart
Gold hoop earrings with yellow beads
$1.50 marked down from 5 US Dollars
Decorate my years shrivel the sari to a
A skirt I buy at Forever 21
$10.00 marked down from more than that
With my skin the color of cinnamon bark
I dress up for a lark. I make naan and
Have An American friend photograph
Me by the Yellow Barn
The lentils are
Cooking slowly, I will add some spinach
And prepare to garnish the dish with some
Dried red chillies
That will crackle in my frying pan
And on your tongue, I will hum a Hindi
Song and you will never know
That perhaps
Like you
I do not know how to live
In a slum.
Cooking A South Indian Curry From Memory
1.
I slice tender red beef, the cold silver blade
Of the knife creating an everglade
Collide worlds in a colander
Demarcate the days on the calendar
Take a cutting from the past
It is not my intention to aghast
Those who consider the cow holy
I just want to cook a curry boldly
Solely
from memory.
2.
Listen. Here in America,
They tell me– the poet – that the onion
an apple and the potato
all have the same taste.
That the differences in flavor
Are caused by their smell.
Listen. Here they prove
these things
Science, Surveys, Studies.
I can’t argue with their facts.
I don’t. The facts mount this
case from Malaysia
And ride it, like a show horse,
around and around until I am
ground into the spices
bleeding the truth in my marrow bones
for William Butler Yeats
and this South Indian Curry I am cooking from
memory because I am
ornery
3.
To prove the onion, an apple
and the potato the same
They say – pinch your nose
Take a bite.
They will all taste sweet.
Try it!
Booze, women and writing.
All the same.
4.
I remember my Hindu father swinging a bag
Of goat’s intestines
For my mother to cook, she ran water
In the sink
Obediently washing the insides of a goat
Wrinkling her nose in distaste
Listen. Charles Bu-cow- ski wrote a poem
About a Mexican girl
Who washed his private part
With a rag
5.
Contemporary American men’s poetry
is that sultry
the Buddhist monks who conducted
Bu-cow-ski’s funeral rites
must set their sights a tad higher
for women. Our gravestones
ought to read: “Don’t Try”
like his.
Alternatively:
“Don’t Cry”.
The more things change
The more women I find
On the streets – like loose change.
They, like all things, stay the same.
6.
Or am I cooking this up from memory
Mixing it up with chicory
Using it to pound a point in
Like ginger and garlic
In a medley of flavors
For a variety of favors
Like the Thai and Indonesian women
With splayed toes
Who for a few bhat or rupiah
Rub the stress off the backs
Of the missionaries selling Jesus
Vying for a chance to stand
Beside Bill Gates? Accolades.
7.
I ought to go back to cooking the
South Indian curry from memory.
Don’t use beef. The cow is holy.
Remember?
Use chicken. Hold your nose.
And all the horses in Colorado.
It would be a good idea to hold
Your tongue as well, my belle.
Show some cleavage at Christmas.
And don’t joke about mangoes.
Or tell them that wearing a sari
And exposing the navel is asking
to get raped. Save the juicy parts
for when the Guests go away.
..unless they stay.
8.
Then you can tell them the recipe.
How you stand poised on the edge of the precipice
Cooking South Indian curry from memory
Listening for some inner harmony
Orange and purple bougainvillea
Climbing over the balcony like all
The idealized Tamil lovers
Of the silver screen
Your love of all things
falling unrequited
like the bougainvillia
Bunga kertas, paper flowers
Your nail polish, the new indigo blue of the sky.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Anca Vlasopolos was born in Bucharest, Rumania. Her father, a political prisoner of the Communist regime in Rumania, died when Anca was eight. After a sojourn in Paris and Brussels, at fourteen she immigrated to the United States with her mother, a prominent Rumanian intellectual and a survivor of Auschwitz. Anca is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her poetry collection is titled Penguins In A Warming World. Anca is also the author of an award winning novel, The New Bedford Samurai and the memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement.
Wedded Bliss
gold bands glint
over a plastic bucket
where two pairs of hands
lovingly
gut
fish no bigger
than the hands
this could be a portrait
of marriage
man and woman
in harmonious
complicity
fish gored bleeding
from the side
Above the Bird’s Eye View
winter this year
sprang
a lynx
from still full-leaved branches
huge paws of wind to bat us
should we raise eyes toward light
or sigh at the thin horizon
arriving earlier each day
in this desolation in drab and gray
i look from a second-story window
see him—olive camouflage
for a pulsebeat unzipped
his rich summer gold
streaking
sun bullet
bursting through lynx dominion
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