From Eva Heisler’s “Drawing Water”
Women stand in stocking feet; each read aloud a different poem at the same
time.
I recognize the cadence of poetry but I cannot locate poems.
line break heart break
A sign announces “rest area of the unattractive.”
Another indicates “rest area of the witty.”
We teeter as we read with weak voices, as signs sort us into the lovely
and the unlovely, as reflections on a polished floor
break at our feet, as our voices
break, as bones
break in our dreams, as poems
break into incoherencies, as the sea
breaks at our back door.
□
[rest area of the wise / rest area of the unwise / rest area of the
attractive / rest area of the unattractive /
rest area of the stout and unlawful]
—
This selection comes from Eva Heisler’s book Drawing Water, available from Noctuary Press! Purchase your copy here!
Eva Heisler is a Maryland-born poet and art critic who lived in Iceland for many years and now resides in Germany. Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press, 2013) features a series of prose poems that explore failures of translation, the materiality of voice, and the relationship of language to perception. The book-length poem Drawing Water (Noctuary Press, 2013) meditates on line (conceptual line, descriptive line, expressive line, and found line) in an attempt to rethink the poetic line. Vocabulary Landscape, a work-in progress, explores the language of landscape description; an excerpt was recently published in Asymptote.
Leslie LaChance‘s poems have appeared in Quiddity, JMWW, the Best of the Net Anthology, Apple Valley Review, The Greensboro Review, Juked, The Birmingham Poetry Review, Slow Trains, Free Lunch, Chronogram, and Appalachian Journal. She also edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration. Her chapbook, How She Got That Way, appears in the quartet volume Mend & Hone from Toadlily Press.
