POETRY PROSE FEATURED POET FEATURED ARTIST CONTRIBUTORS GUIDELINES ABOUT TIMELINE
Sally Nacker


Emily

I advise you if you don't know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.
--Emily Dickinson to Abiah Root, September 26, 1845


Over one hundred years ago,
Emily sifted flour in
a mixing bowl. Like twinkling snow,
flour dusted her white apron.

Flour she swiftly sifted in
dusted her brow. As she kneaded,
the powder clung to her apron;
the world that cupped her receded.

She wiped her brow as she needed.
As she hoped for love's vast oven,
her dark world of grief receded--
inside herself she found heaven

where love rose, warm as the oven.
In a mixing bowl--white as snow--
Emily made bread from heaven--
over one hundred years ago.



Cardinal

for my mother

At the foot of a budding tree
below my window,
I spot a silent cardinal.
It must have dropped abruptly.

I heard the blunt sound
on the clear pane; I know it
from when I was a child.
Thinking it was bound

for our living room, a bird would crash
against the glass. Just when beauty
started up again, we'd hear it;
after winter passed.

Sometimes, a bird would just be stunned.
But mostly, it lay dead.
Mother, those times, in concert
with my sensitivity, you led

the way, and we would bury
the stilled thing. Last May, for hours
we planted impatiens in the sun.
July came, and on your casket I lay flowers.

I think how unfair that we
must always lose the found--
all of this bright red, the spring--
as I place the cardinal in the ground.

































AUTHOR BIO

Sally Nacker received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University in January, 2013. She has since been selected as a finalist for the Fairfield Book Prize--as well as a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard Review's Series in Poetry--for her collection Vireo. Her paper, "Wings and Windows: My Letter to Amy Lowell," introduced by poet Annie Finch on Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog, is published as a web-based project on Winona Media. She has three poems in the spring, 2014 issue of The Wayfarer: A Journal of Contemplative Literature. She resides in Connecticut with her husband and their two cats.

POETRY CONTRIBUTORS

Melissa Balmain
Judith Barrington
Meredith Bergmann
Jane Blanchard
Cally Conan-Davies
Barbara Lydecker Crane
Mary Cresswell
Rebekah Curry
Anna Evans
Marcene Gandolfo
Claudia Gary
Gwen Hart
A. J. Huffman
Kathryn Jacobs
Geneva Kachman
Joan Mazza
Susan McLean
Sally Nacker
Janice D. Soderling
A. M. Thompson
Cara Valle
Marly Youmans
Seree Zohar

NEWS

>We are pleased to announce that Anne-Marie Thompson is the recipient of the Mezzo Cammin scholarship at the West Chester University Poetry Conference and Wendy Sloan is the recipient of The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project scholarship.

FEATURED ARTIST
Judith Schaecter: I found the beauty of stained glass to be the perfect counterpoint to ugly and difficult subjects. Although the figures I work with are supposed to be ordinary people doing ordinary things, I see them as having much in common with the old medieval windows of saints and martyrs. They seem to be caught in a transitional moment when despair becomes hope or darkness becomes inspiration. They seem poised between the threshold of everyday reality and epiphany, caught between tragedy and comedy.

My work is centered on the idea of transforming the wretched into the beautiful--say, unspeakable grief, unbearable sentimentality or nerve wracking ambivalence, and representing it in such a way that it is inviting and safe to contemplate and captivating to look at. I am at one with those who believe art is a way of feeling ones feelings in a deeper, more poignant way.

I would describe my process as derived almost entirely from traditional techniques in use for centuries. The imagery is predominantly engraved into layers of glass; only the black and yellow are painted and fired on in a kiln. The pieces are soldered together in a copperfoil and lead matrix.
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
Louisiana State University Press
Northwestern Univ Press
Ohio Univ Press
Persea Books
Red Hen Press
Texas Tech Univ Press
Tupelo Press
Univ of Akron Press
Univ of Arkansas Press
Univ of Illinois Press
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
10X10