Mannequin Envy
a journal of visual and literary arts
~fall 2006 ~
| I’m
a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and
also help my husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field
projects. My poems have appeared in Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The
New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere, and I’m
included in the new anthology, California Poetry: Gold Rush to the
Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). My manuscript The Downstairs
Dance Floor is winner of this year's Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook
Prize. It is now available from Texas A&M University Press Consortium Enigma Variations You chose the lobster alfredo with a pale chardonnay. The bride’s in sculpted roses of a champagne shade. She wears an unfocused smile that hovers over no one in particular, a sea breeze whispering fare-thee in her veil. Double rings encompass one world and leave the rest out. Now, lifted glasses garter the bouquet; a barter-dance for fivers, and she floats away. Remember how the yachts rock airily-uneasy in their slips. Beyond plate-glass, remember the scent of breakers. Pelicans plummet after fish. One great blue heron still as hammered metal waits. Secrets "Without a secret you could never be alone." -- James DenBoer The dragon in the science lab, his scales illuminated by the ghost- light of Bunsen burners in the dark, when the white coats are hung up by the door. Oh dreams of chemistry and synapse, why your son’s brain works the way it does, and doesn’t. How I saw his dragons in my child- hood, they lived in the bathroom drain. How I thought I schooled them all away. |