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Still Life with Cabbage and Clogs, by Elisabeth Weiss
4/19/2019 Nights, the artist and the cook dream the same dream of blooming roots in simple vessels, of blood pudding, pails of cool water, cold milk. All winter the chirr of the artist’s scissors, his pencil marks erased, mistakes on creamy Ingres paper. The cook wears handkerchiefs, feathers of earliest birds too weak to fly. When the sharpened cleaver meets the groove between stalk and flowering head obsidian clouds thrust forth. Small particles coat the frosty air. The cook warms herself with brandy. Her granite fingers sigh. She closes the shutters, mutters strains and tosses, peels potatoes, then staggers fireside, serves with honey and salt on baked clay platters. She thrusts her feet into wooden clogs, removes her tattered linen apron and steps outside the doorframe. Each evening she feeds scraps to hogs crisscrosses cow paths tousling tufts of onion grass. She walks past the cottage on the heath the meadow, the elm trees in the churchyard, the barn with the thatched roof while the artist studies how layers peel, bones discard, and patterns of fields appear in the eggshell cabbage sprawled wide.
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This month, I am a feature poet in the latest issue of Muddy River Poetry Review. In their words:
Elisabeth Weiss, our other feature poet in this issue, teaches writing and literature at Salem State University and North Shore Community College. Her commitment to poetry includes teaching in prisons, nursing homes and other venues. Her MFA is from The University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and she is widely published in leading poetry magazines. Visit the Muddy River Poetry Review site to view my featured works, or view the PDF here. Today as I glance out at January’s first whiteout, obliterating the world from my window, I happily nestle back under blankets to recharge with Nick Flynn’s first book, Some Ether. First books read as coming of age novels in that they make a stake in outlining a poet’s primary obsessions and concerns. In Some Ether the poems ache for interconnectedness and express fear of drowning in that need. Full of uncertainties, Flynn longs to find beauty in what is often an ugly and terrible world.
Lis Weiss Horowitz: The Bicyclist
In Memorium Ondar Goekce 1952-1995 We buried you on the hottest day while your children, impatient with grief and the long ride in the limousine, jumped through the fluid hoop the sprinkler cast in the neighbor’s grass, the sun directly above. The sermon on how briefly we love meant nothing when the priest in his Turkish folds opened the top of your pine box and rolled you onto your side, turning your weight to face Mecca. My envoy, who slipped off your bicycle on a clear day without traffic, as you were turning to your wife to say something, could anything have broken your fall? Did you know you were pedaling away from us forever? She said the bike sailed out from under you as if it had a mind of its own. You who go before us, at the turn of the block, a turn we all have taken, where houses begin again after the marsh where will you be this winter while we skate on the strange calm of the time we have? republished from MassPoetry Poem of the Moment |
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