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Dzvinia Orlowsky
Peter Schwartz
Annabelle Moseley
David Trame
Marcus Cafagña
Lyn Lifshin
John Grey
Mankh
Sam Hamill
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Venus at the Fountain of Joy
In Siena, I paused
by the Fountain of Joy,
to run my hand in the icy water,
refresh my fatigue.
I turned and emerged as Venus
from that scallop-shelled bath,
drowsy,
impatient—
waiting for the next artist
to paint my portrait—
render me awake and smiling—
instead of travel-weary,
salt-scarred,
roughly twirling this strand of pearls.
Jayne's Hill (West Hills, Long Island)
At dusk, I walk from the birthplace of Whitman,
where infant cries and first words
still resound like woodwinds,
Quaker voices playing against the walls—
notes, measured conversation, steady pulse.
Outside, in the mid-summer stagnancy,
one breeze interrupts the heat
and I follow it
to stand on the island's highest point—
Jayne's Hill,
where the Whitmans often walked.
The music of this place throbs,
swollen with the instruments of trees
shaking their percussive sleeves
from trunks of bump and bark
as cicadas scratch a friction of love-cries
and the last light falls between leaves
like stains of white milk and dark honey
spilled and clinging to the underbrush.
Louisa's spirit is dressed in blue tonight.
We are together on Zion.
Annabelle Moseley is Poet-in-Residence at the Stevenson Academy of Fine Arts
in Oyster Bay, NY, where she teaches classes in poetry and memoir. Her
poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Texas Review, The New
Formalist, The Lyric, Poetry Nottingham International, Poetrybay, Swansea:
The Seventh Quarry, and Ruah, etc. In 2002, she won the Poetry Prize from
the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, and in 2005 Birnham Wood
Graphics published her first chapbook of poetry, The Moon is a Lemon. Her
website may be viewed at www.annabellemoseley.com.
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