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Fall 2008
Susan Slaviero
Christine Swint
Meg Pokrass
Jeff Klooger
Paul Fisher
Jeff Calhoun
C.E. Chaffin
Holly Day
Paul Fisher
Nathan Graziano
Jennifer Jabaily
Jeff Klooger
Joanne Lowery
Karen Neuberg
Meg Pokrass
Doug Ramspeck
Bill Roberts
Shoshauna Shy
Susan Slaviero
Gerald So
Janice D. Soderling
Paul Stevens
Joshua Michael Stewart
Laura Grace Weldon
Teresa White
Robert Stastny
Christine Swint
Winter P. Williams
Jennifer VanBuren
Jai Britton
Patrick Carrington
Alex Nodopaka
Mannequin Envy in memory of poet and artist Douglas Gamrath
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Kelley J. White
Fall 2007
What Kites Do
They leave your hands hesitantly
after false starts and falser returns
string tauter and tauter as you run
faster than you knew you could
beneath their demand for flight.
They are beautiful rising.
They are beautiful gone beyond your reach.
They require your constant attention,
tug insistent, dancing on currents
you don’t understand, twisting, higher.
You must watch them wobble,
string gone slack in your hands,
running, trying to guess the needful
thing, to match their dance. You want
them to climb. Your steps fail,
and they always fall, plunge
with a great rattle of wind and tail.
You might cut the string
before they tear free
despite all your running and fall
in a place you will never find,
twisted in high voltage wires, sinking
in rough water, torn and crushed
on a distant highway. You wish
them good skies. Winded,
you may not catch them, carried
beyond you, they’ve forgotten you,
who meant only to bring them home
2006
Candida
and if your body were bread? and my hands, kneading
like a small cat at your belly, your poor sad gray dough, as if
that were a comfort, this sense of need, this sense
of a small one purring hopeful
of your providence, as if inside you
were sweet heat of solace, a stone
against hunger, a hollow of steam
waiting for my buttery
knife
Cold Requiem
He’s rarely home before dark
and this is a wet winter day. He’s turned
the speakers out in the windows
as if it were collegiate spring and the Beach Boys
but it’s not sweet harmonies, it’s
drumming iron wheels and rumbling chains.
He is digging, this man who never smiles
or cries is digging, elbows up
and down to the thrumming, rushing to be done
with it before the voices surge;
I too see black capes in the rain arriving.
He is burying an animal no one loved, a foolish
animal dead in the street and I never thought
to wonder this quarter century might he
have struck it, might he have skidded so and done
this thing in the side yard where daffodils
were then planted new, where he planted all the dead
he found left along the highways. No
he was never the one to do the damage, just
angry in the cleaning up, mud shaken
off the spade, hands wiped, but not on his own
clean clothes.
Art Rules
1. When depicting a landscape, a Chinese
painter must include a single human
figure, barely detectible by the eye, or,
on rare occasions, two. This demonstrates
the significance of man, as opposed to nature.
2. Animals may be included when depicting
the Holy Mother. However, if a monkey
appears he must be chained, and under no
circumstances may the artist include a cat.
3. When a quilt or rug nears perfect
completion it is advisable to create
a flaw, this signifying human humility
and failure to any spirit or power, benign
or otherwise. This tradition is common
to Native Americans, the Amish, Middle
Eastern Nomadic peoples, and Arachne
(should she get another chance).
4. Extremely complicated rules exist
regarding the depiction of saints
in association with the instruments
of their martyrdom. One would not,
for example, depict St. Lawrence transfixed
with arrows nor St. Sebastian on a grill
(however, one might do so if careful study
revealed multiple episodes of near-decease,
as in the case of the non-saint Rasputin.)
a. Care must be taken lest St. Lucy’s
enucleated eyes appear to be walnuts
or St. Barbara’s breasts be confused
with muffins or hot-cross buns.
b. Similar attention must be paid
when depicting certain African
and Buddhist deities. Westerners
are often unaware of such mistakes.
5. When depicting Hell it is helpful to depict
Heaven, or, in the case of Buddhist renditions,
Nirvana. This is not as interesting
for the artist, nor the viewer,
but may provide some insomnia relief.
A New Hampshire native, Kelley White studied at Dartmouth College and Harvard Medical School and has been a pediatrician in inner-city Philadelphia for more than twenty years. Mother of three, she is an active Quaker. Her poems have been widely published over the past five years, including several book collections and chapbooks, and have appeared in numerous journals including Exquisite Corpse, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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