POETRY TRANSLATION FEATURE FEATURED ARTIST CONTRIBUTORS GUIDELINES ABOUT TIMELINE
Michele Leavitt


Even though my body wants to cleave in two to hold her


driftwood jams the riverbends as if
stacked up for a bone-fire of the gods.
I whisper baby's name to wake her, make
her take her bottle, juice and syrup laced

with Phenobarbital to still her seizures.
I love her chubby skin, like butter left
in sun, if butter would not melt. She will
not wake and cannot hold her head up, though

she's twelve months old, though now I see the driftwood
angles up toward stars as if it points toward
hope, as if it's true that God or time
combines mistakes to make a thing of beauty.

I made her. I am guilty. I am thirsty.
Sometimes I think a fire would be a mercy.



A flawless theory of everything

I woke up knowing my mistake--to trust
the fate that brought me this far North, where dawn
arrives too soon in summer. Wrapped in night
clothes and resentment, envying the lilies of a neighbor's
garden from my deck, I don't expect
the pair of hummingbirds mobbing me
at knee point, their throats phosphoric green,
their wings invisible as flesh can wish
to be. They have mistaken me, my shabby
ruby robe, my frou-frou feather slippers,
for wells of nectar, confused our meeting with
a miracle. They start, then zigzag off,
but leave this proof against the flaws I make:
a world too dense with meetings for mistake.

































AUTHOR BIO

Michele Leavitt, 2010 winner of the William Allen Creative Nonfiction Prize from The Ohio State University, is a high school dropout, former trial attorney and hepatitis C survivor who now teaches writing at the University of Idaho. She has had poems and prose published in a wide variety of print and online journals, including The Humanist, Ragazine, The Lyric, and The Platte Valley Review. Her poetry chapbook, The Glass Transition, will be published by Finishing Line Press in June of 2010.

POETRY CONTRIBUTORS

Melissa Balmain
Janann Dawkins
Juleigh Howard Hobson
Anjie Kokan
Jean L. Kreiling
Luann Landon
Michele Leavitt
Mary Meriam
Gail White
Holly Woodward
Marly Youmans

NEWS
Mezzo Cammin is proud to announce that The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, which will eventually be the largest database of women poets in the world, was launched on Saturday, March 27, 2010, at 6:00 PM at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Tom Field)
Visit Timeline.
FEATURED ARTIST
Gail Biederman: I use sewing as a form of drawing, as one way to alter a surface. Thread is my line, a physical presence that hovers in space in my installations. With both a cast shadow and an edge that catches the light, thread creates multiple realities, a jumbled mix of hard and soft, the solid and the ephemeral.
ARCHIVES
LINKS
POETRY
32 Poems
The Academy of American Poets
The Atlantic
The Christian Science Monitor
The Cortland Review
Favorite Poem Project
The Frost Place
The Iowa Review
Light Quarterly
Modern American Poetry
Measure
The Poem Tree
Poetry
Poetry Daily
Poetry Society of America
Poets House
Raintown Review
Slate
String Poet
Valparaiso Poetry Review
Verse Daily
Women's Poetry Listserv
The Yale Review

CONFERENCES
AWP
Bread Loaf
Poetry by the Sea
Sewanee


PUBLISHERS

Barefoot Muse Press
David Robert Books
David R. Godine Press
Graywolf Press
Headmistress Press
The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Univ of Akron Press
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Univ of Iowa Press
Waywiser Press
White Violet Press

BOOKS
Alibris
City Lights
Grolier Poetry Bookshop
Joseph Fox Bookshop
Prairie Lights
Tattered Cover Bookstore

OTHER RESOURCES
92nd Street Y
Literary Mothers
NewPages.com
Poets & Writers
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