Coming Attractions
Morning opens its door on scoured light
and sweeps my cluttered rooms.
The sky’s been rinsed with wind.
The land bleached down to its bones.
October was a lit match—every shade
of tree on fire, the lawn a sheet
strewn with leaves redder than petals.
There are women who shouldn’t
wear mascara. There are poems of glass,
all windows, that you can open
to observe a ghost’s beating heart.
Note how each chamber
serves as its own paperweight—
how a wing’s blue pulse
is actually a lake that mirrors lightning.
The switch of our attention
flickers as the day scrolls down
to a hotel for professional snugglers
that might be a treasure map,
might be a brothel.
—
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.
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