Tag: best dressed

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Lori Lamothe’s “Diary in Irregular Ink”

lori-lamothe-headshot-2

2075

Our shirts will change color on cue,
we’ll order take-out with our sleeves

and if we meet for lunch in Paris
the spoons will float into our hands.

Every night the guy in the movie
will ditch the drop dead redhead

and step naked into our bedrooms.
The weather will be endless blue,

with rain falling over us like light
and darkness always raining sleep.

We’ll be 100 but look 19.
Our thighs will be thin, our lips

will be fat and we’ll all be blonde
without visible roots.

At five o’clock, when our cars
usher us into twilight

we’ll lean back
and watch the past blur by—

all seven dimensions of seeing
fanning out behind us, disappearing

faster than the velocity of perfection.

—

This selection comes from Lori Lamothe’s chapbook Diary in Irregular Ink, available from ELJ Publications. Purchase your copy here!

Lori Lamothe’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, CALYX, cream city review, Emerge Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Stone Highway Review, Third Coast, and other magazines. She is the author a full-length collection, Trace Elements (Aldrich Press), and of two other chapbooks, Camera Obscura (Finishing Line Press) and Ouija in Suburbia (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2015).

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Lori Lamothe’s “Diary in Irregular Ink”

diarycinirregularinkcover

Mani-Pedi

Footbaths bubble sudsy rainbows
and Buddha laughs a silence golden

but then the chatter flows past me again
like a river around a rock.

I’m reading a book about physics,
underlining the lines I understand.

So far I have one. Its yellow ribbon
unravels to infinity

then disappears inside a mirror’s open door.
I don’t feel like a rock

more like a pebble. The woman next to me
is texting Spanish lovers

and from her leather throne
my daughter smiles and waves.

Against the far wall, rows of colors
stand at attention, a sparkly army

ready to conquer all mankind.
Every name is a promise—

Luna, Atlantis, Up All Night, Long Kiss.
According to the line I (don’t) understand

the Universe may be a single slice
in a loaf of cosmic bread.

—

This selection comes from Lori Lamothe’s chapbook Diary in Irregular Ink, available from ELJ Publications. Purchase your copy here!

Lori Lamothe’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, CALYX, cream city review, Emerge Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Stone Highway Review, Third Coast, and other magazines. She is the author a full-length collection, Trace Elements (Aldrich Press), and of two other chapbooks, Camera Obscura (Finishing Line Press) and Ouija in Suburbia (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2015).

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Lori Lamothe’s “Diary in Irregular Ink”

lori-lamothe-headshot-2

Dance of the Unsquared Circles

To lure the taste of chocolate
out of chocolate, add salt.
It’s not the old equation,

only a recipe for sensibility.
Opposites don’t attract, just end up
like the couple that set fire to civility

and chalked a faultline down the center
of possession. Or it’s the other way around—
two people wearing their anger inside out

for twenty years—all that electricity
trapped behind a flickering of false lives.
Call it cold fusion, or misery, or lightning

minus light. Call it whatever you like.
The trick is to find out what charges what—
to know the differences that revolve

in imaginary spaces—
Andromeda and The Milky Way
caught in a waltz of mutual gravity.

Let cardinals bring out the snow in snow.
Let the tree behind bullet-proof glass,
its leaves spindling toward sun,

make you crave an infinity of ocean.
If you want me to love you
write a graffiti of rain-slick roads

across the Sahara of my distance,
tattoo a dusting of particles
onto the terra incognita of my fear.

—

This selection comes from Lori Lamothe’s chapbook Diary in Irregular Ink, available from ELJ Publications. Purchase your copy here!

Lori Lamothe’s poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, CALYX, cream city review, Emerge Literary Journal, Seattle Review, Stone Highway Review, Third Coast, and other magazines. She is the author a full-length collection, Trace Elements (Aldrich Press), and of two other chapbooks, Camera Obscura (Finishing Line Press) and Ouija in Suburbia (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2015).

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Maureen Alsop’s “Mantic”

Maureen Alsop

Eromancy

           divination by means of the air

O inevitable architect, in your false prime the last of your images blew off in a breeze of
sawdust & chalk. At the fair, I stole a pinhole photograph of the moon. I carried apple
blossoms floating over a black lake in my coat pocket. Your name, I ingested. Now light
empties over waves imitating driftwood, a dry weight, counterbalance to what love
abandons. The thought of blood in my arteries remains an illogic warmth. I remember the
earnest, but now uncertain, affections. The night tilts. Silver tokens, perhaps stars. I stand
among the living reading your initials. White ink tattooed on water.

—

This selection comes from Maureen Alsop’s book of poetry Mantic, available from Augury Books. Purchase your copy here!

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of several poetry collections including Appartion Wren, Mantic, Later, Knives & Trees, and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming). www.maureenalsop.com

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Maureen Alsop’s “Mantic”

MANTIC_cover

Thumomancy

           divination  by means of one’s own soul

I would not notice your faint intrusion, but for the vignette edge
of the landscape, where your face
is an accident without origin.

I see you have been here all along. Let me tell you things
can happen in the years. Last winter a squirrel
died in the cabin
chimney. There is no

single script. Only the last three orders
of breath made before silence. Night has
given me my wide addiction. Under
uncertain laws, in the sleep of no choice, I follow
motivations downward into the sweep

of your pen. Scrawled lights of a new city
wink between rows of tamarisk. The center
of the book is a catastrophe, but
with love there is a lack

of distance. You have led me into the first
threshold of your vision. Jupiter
glows through a ragweed thicket. There is no
body. No sound. You go on without
calculation for the beginning. You go on

under the lowering
of gravity. Most

recent of animals, your lost papers fill
the closet. All afternoon you
constructed snow angels, turning your palms
skyward, but the gesture
of your hands were not holy. Tonight the oncoming
boxcar whistles your unfolding.

—

This selection comes from Maureen Alsop’s book of poetry Mantic, available from Augury Books. Purchase your copy here!

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of several poetry collections including Appartion Wren, Mantic, Later, Knives & Trees, and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming). www.maureenalsop.com

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Maureen Alsop’s “Mantic”

Maureen Alsop

Dendromancy, Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit

            divination by means of leaves and branches of oak

A lark-blue wakeling is the furnace’s doctrine of visible richness. It is that
which I fear when the ceiling bears down. My mind’s

withholding is motion alone

like the whole shadow of a blown star. I have reread my love
times and times, the purple tendering, a weird brilliance
beyond the driveway’s flowering iris. I suppose

it’s where the body’s warmth is kept. At least
through the flare of one empire’s duration. When the last border
of the soul was predicted, you arrived,

a child thing yourself, I asked you, out of whose dream
did your tiny god disperse, burning
your fortune’s immensity? Might you
step outward whispering, I saw you. Might you name
the woods anew, stand in a thicket
among the unburnt pine
searching the distance granted
by your dominion. First you,
then you.

I have let home your dead. Let
snow loosen, glitter the earth.

—

This selection comes from Maureen Alsop’s book of poetry Mantic, available from Augury Books. Purchase your copy here!

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of several poetry collections including Appartion Wren, Mantic, Later, Knives & Trees, and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming). www.maureenalsop.com

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Maureen Alsop’s “Mantic”

MANTIC_cover

Notes From the Blue Terrace

The pink lungs of a mule strain toward shade, his
yellowed lips saliva slick. The gardener wanders
late into the hills, unclothed in delirium. The nub
of his work thickens into bloom. He spends the day
threshing thrashing thatching until
the weight of a painted magpie
steadies him. One arm of the constellation
is a wing glazed with heat— a perfectly
beautiful waste of talent. Along the riverbank I water
my horse. The tin-rain-slosh shimmers
down her flank. The gardener stops and asks me:

What is it to die like this? He opens

his palm. He sees nothing in me astonished
by his offering. I am in the place he would not
circle—a lovely drop in his voice,
the makeshift sound of a tanager in the backyard
of a monastery. The gardener turns in shadow
to retrieve a blue trace of awkwardness. The sun
here is also crazed.

—

This selection comes from Maureen Alsop’s book of poetry Mantic, available from Augury Books. Purchase your copy here!

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of several poetry collections including Appartion Wren, Mantic, Later, Knives & Trees, and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming). www.maureenalsop.com

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Maureen Alsop’s “Mantic”

Maureen Alsop

Epiphany

The moment your body deserted the soul a last
spasm of air passed through your right
nostril. I will tell you

how it happened. Without
mercy & too
late you had learned that you were made
to be loved. Someone soaked your

nakedness in honey & oiled
your chest with pycnantha. Your head
was shaved. The red dark
room was lit by a single votive, & the draft from hallway
coaxed the flame
to dance. Your voice
rose pointless as no one
could hear you
muttering you still
thought you remembered
and insisted on it. You said I remember stalling
 over the wide white bed they say

it is this love. In readiness, the radio
failed. A blueprint of static clamped
over your ears. A gray
heat swarmed your throat. The briefest
face you say from cloud you say. From the deep

north I watched & could
do nothing to help.

—

This selection comes from Maureen Alsop’s book of poetry Mantic, available from Augury Books. Purchase your copy here!

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of several poetry collections including Appartion Wren, Mantic, Later, Knives & Trees, and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming). www.maureenalsop.com

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dawn Lonsinger’s “Whelm”

dawnlonsinger

Slow Saunter of Wither

A cow’s ears can turn in any direction, and the field
is full of those flickering radar, small curtains

of flesh. We are an acoustic location, a passing thing.
Our car gulps in the grass air, is pulled by an under-

current. Dependence like a taste, the dark drawbridge
of night folding form down into nestle, wind rattling

the hollow half-note of mailboxes. The chest
floor opens upon the earth, slow saunter of wither

and hook bone, verb between sun and graze, sun and
subsequently. No moo. No matter. Who or what was

the first to look toward the teat of another animal and feel
thirsty? Did they also feel suspended? Sleepy? Cosseted?

Guilt or indignity for the theft? I am, even now, startled
by their calmness, heart girth purring like a small fan.

Milk teetering in warm pockets, and us nearby–
continuous intravenous drip. Dream of clotted cream,

sinewy lullaby. Water to wine–that’s showmanship. Water
to milk–that’s love and peril. A marriage that should raise

a cathedral up around their pin bones, sacred the space
so to take is to need: dire roast. But instead we

forklift the living into the living, harvest what we can.
News reports recall meat is piling up in school districts.

Freezers. Hangs from our bodies. When the cows lie down
in unison, we better run for cover. I try, but my feet are full

of meat, heavy against the moving vehicle on the moving earth,
milky clouds amassing above us like a scavenging.

—

This selection comes from Dawn Lonsinger’s book Whelm, available from Lost Horse Press. Purchase your copy here!

In addition to Whelm, Dawn Lonsinger is the author of two chapbooks: the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions; chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest), and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press). You can see the books and other things on her website:  www.dawnlonsinger.com. Her poems have recently appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Third Coast, Poetry East, and elsewhere.  Lyric essays are out in recent issues of Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review.  Dawn is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. More recently she won the Scowcroft Prize (chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch), an Academy of American Poets Prize (chosen by Heather McHugh), three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards, the Utah Writers’ Contest in prose (chosen by Susan Steinberg) and poetry (chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum), runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix), runner up for The Bat City Review Art & Writing Collaboration Prize (chosen by Tomaž Šalamun), and was awarded four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. She was also selected by Claudia Emerson for Best New Poets 2010. Dawn did her undergraduate studies at Bucknell University, majoring in English and photography.

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dawn Lonsinger’s “Whelm”

whelm

Incidental Love Poem

I step in the water sloughed off your body onto the bathroom floor.
I sleep in your stains, wake in your border, eat your leftovers, sweep
up your dead skin cells. Your sauces sit in my refrigerator like organs
in their transparent, breakable containers. When you are here I hear
you cough, stroke your skin as if to keep it taut. We swap colorless,
odorless gases and saliva. Our eyes bob in our magnetic faces. When
you are elsewhere, I curl like an old photograph trying to raise its dead.
I swim in three lakes simultaneously. I part my hair down the middle
of my head through the mirror where you untie your face, the sutures
undetectable. I think of your body as a plank and a screen, of your soul
as a cloud of grasshoppers. My tongue absorbs the salt in your skin,
swallows oceans, the giant gyratory seagulls scanning my face, the sun
holding my tender pink core together as you do. I finger through your
pages, listen to the symbols grind their teeth. Your things congregate in
small heaps. They take on significance, crystallize, and I am deep into
the damp cavern of idolatry. I put on your shirt, spread peanut butter
on toast. In my dreams I fondle your blue glacier, pull hummingbirds
from your chest, feel quenched. I admire how your mouth never looks
like a dam blasted with carp, how it evaporates in the skeletal light
of the hallway. Our gravity is horizontal, palpable as heavy whipping
cream. I decorate absence. I pull one of your hairs from my mouth.

—

This selection comes from Dawn Lonsinger’s book Whelm, available from Lost Horse Press. Purchase your copy here!

In addition to Whelm, Dawn Lonsinger is the author of two chapbooks: the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions; chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest), and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press). You can see the books and other things on her website:  www.dawnlonsinger.com. Her poems have recently appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Guernica, Third Coast, Poetry East, and elsewhere.  Lyric essays are out in recent issues of Black Warrior Review and Western Humanities Review.  Dawn is the recipient of the Corson Bishop Prize, Smartish Pace’s Beullah Rose Prize, a Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship. More recently she won the Scowcroft Prize (chosen by Lidia Yuknavitch), an Academy of American Poets Prize (chosen by Heather McHugh), three Utah Arts Council Writing Awards, the Utah Writers’ Contest in prose (chosen by Susan Steinberg) and poetry (chosen by Wayne Koestenbaum), runner up for the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award (chosen by H.L. Hix), runner up for The Bat City Review Art & Writing Collaboration Prize (chosen by Tomaž Šalamun), and was awarded four Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. She was also selected by Claudia Emerson for Best New Poets 2010. Dawn did her undergraduate studies at Bucknell University, majoring in English and photography.

Marika von Zellen has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Cornell College (no, not the one in Ithaca). She’s had poetry and fiction published in Open Field, Temporary Infinity, The Grin City Monthly, and the anthology Rock & Roll Saved My Soul. As an Editorial Assistant for Sundress, she’s copy-edited the book Picture Dictionary (2014); as a freelance editor she copy-edited the photography book Face It (2013). In the summer of 2012, she attended the Grin City Collective Artist Residency in Iowa. Besides writing, she enjoys theoretical physics, playing piano, ghost-hunting, climbing trees, and drinking good Czech beer. She’s also a scholar of Lewis Carroll.