Issue #33.7 Laura Michiels, J.R. Solonche, Mila Holt
A Poem by Laura Michiels
Bust
Two heavy lumps of clay attached to my torso moulded into place by a thousand fingers until the shape is to their exact liking.
Hidden beneath layers of ample fabric they still distract. Late into the night I add complicated charts to slideshows pour numbers into staggering structures words chewed and mashed into soft texture.
I enter a room filled with wolfish grins. My voice withers, my chest engages in an unwitting dance buttons strain energy of animal pelts and hunting.
Jacket closed, I speak up. My eyes desperate fish hooks keep on sinking no catch of the day unless I allow a sliver of skin to ripple.
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Laura Michiels is a theatre scholar and poet based near Brussels in Belgium. She holds a PhD in American Literature and wrote a scholarly monograph about Tennessee Williams. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming with Thorn & Bloom, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, The Brussels Review and The Ekphrastic Review. Her poetry project focuses on female myth-making, performance, and mental illness.
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A Poem by J.R. Solonche
The Dark Side
There is another side to the story,
the one the moon keeps to itself,
turned away from our small, prying eyes, like someone reading a private letter who shifts her shoulder to block the view. A landscape of pure listening.
No rivers, no trees, no wind to blow.
Only the cold weight of ancient impacts,
craters named for men who thought deeply about things they could never touch. We think we see the whole truth.
We map the glowing seas of dust, and we call it the moon, forgetting the rest. Of course, it is not dark at all. It gets as much sun as the front, a long, slow baking of dust and craters, a blind and deaf side where the radio goes dead, where astronauts, for a few sharp minutes, are magnificently alone. We call it dark because we are blind to it. We give our ignorance the name of shadow. It’s the room we never go into. It’s the drawer we leave shut. It’s always there, holding up the light we praise so much, bearing the heavy, unseen burden of the dark.
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Nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, twice for the National Book Award and three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.
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A Poem by Mila Holt
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Mila Holt is a former television writer. She has an MFA from Pacific University, where faculty awarded her the merit-based Washburn Scholarship. Her work has been accepted to The Calyx Journal, The Vassar Review, One Art Journal, and other publications. Mila lives in Northern California.
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