This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from The Autobiography of Rain by Lana Hechtman Ayers (Fernwood Press 2024).
Wonder
Sky above
never leaves us,
never abandons us,
though it wears
inscrutable masks—
blues, grays, whites,
kaleidoscopes of dusk & dawn,
black sails of night,
all those stars tiptoeing around
& the floating moon
like a brooch I coveted
my grandma used to wear
on Sabbath days,
crystals that scatter-danced
waxing and waning crescents
of golden light all over
the synagogue,
proof of glory.
Such arrogance
I breathe the sky,
exhale nothing
save devotion.
Cat mama, dog mama, sky-watcher, and former New Yorker Lana Hechtman Ayers earned an MFA in Poetry from New England College. She has authored 4 chapbooks, 9 full-length poetry collections, and has poems appearing in or forthcoming from The London Reader, Peregrine, One Art, and others. In her role as managing editor, she’s ushered 150 poetry collections into the world. Lana is a recovering coffee-obsessive whose favorite color is the swirl of van Gogh’s The Starry Night. From her home in Oregon on the unceded land of the Yaq’on people, on clear quiet nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon.
Joey Gould, who served as Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent > Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), along with transfinity (forthcoming from Lambhouse Books). Their recent work appears in Solstice, Memezine, and Defunkt Magazine’s Surreal Confessional Anthology. They write book reviews as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys, and have also placed reviews in Glass: A Journal of Poetry and the Sundress blog.
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