POETRY FEATURED PROSE FEATURED ARTIST CONTRIBUTORS GUIDELINES ABOUT TIMELINE
Lee Ann Dalton


Forgiven

I've waited for this day for thirty years,
to cross our borders, matching voice to face.
Still, nothing's sure until I see your eyes,
the gap in your teeth, and here, two beauty marks
on your right cheek, the side of you I watched
as you read Tolkien when we were ten.
The mouth you never let me kiss back then
brushes mine and lands against my ear,
a fumbled hug that morphs into relief,
the sting of tears. We hold each other up—
You mumble disbelief into my hair,
then offer me your shirt to wipe my nose,
surprising both of us with how we start
again so easily, from sleeve to heart.

Still Life with Bitten Tongue

Every meal you took began like this:
Aperitif, two pints and then three full
glasses of white I chose to make the sauce,
ruined bits smoothed out by alcohol

and floured butter, magic in the pan.
But first the knife was sharpened, board prepared
for onions, smashing garlic, weight of hand
and blade together. I don’t know what scared

me more: the way I couldn’t stop my tears
even when the air had cleared, or you
storming to your screen, your reddened ears,
sharp shoulders slicing through your shirt. The roux

thickened, redolent with thyme. The truth,
a taste of salt and copper in my mouth.


































AUTHOR BIO

Lee Ann Dalton is a poet, fiction writer, fiber arts columnist, and LGBTQIA+ youth advocate with an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in journals such as New Ohio Review, Faultline, and The Formalist, and her fiction won the 2014 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize at Hunger Mountain. She is a Canadian/American dual citizen and she lives in southern NH with her husband and daughter.

POETRY CONTRIBUTORS

Michelle Blake
Jane Blanchard
Barbara Lydecker Crane
Lee Ann Dalton
Susan de Sola
Michele Leavitt
Lynn Levin
Marjorie Maddox
Carolyn Martin
Bernadette McBride
Susan McLean
Kamilah Aisha Moon (Featured Poet)
Sally Nacker
Patrice Nolan
Katy Rawdon
Leslie Schultz
Myrna Stone
Gail Thomas
Nell Wilson

NEWS

The most recent addition to The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline is Louise Erdrich by Angela Alaimo O'Donnell.

Charlotte Innes was the recipient of the 2018 Mezzo Cammin Scholarship to the Poetry by the Sea conference.

FEATURED ARTIST
Megan Marlatt:Looking like large puppet heads, it was "anima", the root of "animation", that led me to the making of the big heads, (or "capgrossos" as they are called in Catalonia where I learned the craft.) Anima is the soul or what breathes life into a being and to animate an inanimate object, an artist must insert a little soul into it. However to bring attention to what is invisible, (the soul), I chose to mold its opposite in solid form: the persona, the ego, the big head, the mask. Nearly every culture across the globe has masks. They allow performers to climb into the skin of another being and witness the other's world from behind their eyes. While doing so, the mask erases all clues of the performer's age, gender, species or race. In this regard, I find them to be the most transformative and empathic of all human artifacts.

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