Anne Graue
Sestina with Lines from "Elm" by Sylvia Plath
I've always been uneasy in the dark—
its Ouija energy, its torment, an animal that sleeps
under a comforter with a crumpled soft
unsized mask hiding its feathery
exterior, its potential for malignity
that I understand, that keeps me terrified.
The hair on my skin stands up—I'm terrified
of my own shadow. Predatory undulations are dark,
precise, and managed, cloaked in malignity—
disguised as a cool forest canopy. An owl sleeps
fitfully near and in its charity, offers its feathery
presence to no one, nesting with its soft
chicks, their eyes too early to open, their soft
beaks eschewing the hunt. They remain in the nest, terrified
of twig movement, of each other, of their feathery
mother who embraces the deepening dark,
slices through night, returns to where her brood sleeps
hungry for earthworms, the world in all its malignity.
And why do we speak so often of malignity?
Perhaps there is something in the silent soft
tissue of endless possibilities that sleeps
and gnaws on wood until its teeth are gone, terrified
that it won't be able to stop, that the dark
will never be enough to resist the feathery
trim on a ballgown or worse, a feathery
quill that lurches itself through time in a malignity
of language and paper, through dark
matter placed among the stars, some soft
some so hard they cut through diamonds, terrified
of their inability to see that someone sleeps
under a blanket, holy and worn. A vole sleeps
in its burrow where it has made its feathery
nest a sanctuary, where it lives unterrified
of owls, of hawks and all of their malignity
that comes from instinct and not from any soft
emotional disturbance that lives in the dark.
I am terrified by this dark thing
that sleeps in me;
all day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Rhododendron: A Golden Shovel
The boughs of the trees
Are twisted
By many bafflings;
~from "Hermes of the Ways" by H.D.
I glance out of the
window, and see the lavender rhododendron, its boughs
steadfast meeting near the ground reaching for a way out of
itself to spread its solid branches and splay them the
way that they understand, how it's all supposed to work among trees
and flowering shrubs, and the branches are
laden with blossoms, large and lightly dyed above the twisted
grey trunks holding themselves together by
knowing how things have always been, how many
summers have come and gone, their full blooms exploding into
bafflings.
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| AUTHOR BIO |
| Anne Graue is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press, 2020) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Her work can be found in Sundress Publications Best Dressed Blog, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Spoon River Poetry Review, Rogue Agent, Gargoyle, Unbroken Journal, River Heron Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Putnam County, New York and is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review. |
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| POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
 Melissa Balmain
Hilary Biehl
Marie Burdett
Lani Burshtein
Barbara Lydecker Crane
Barbara Crooker
Jehanne Dubrow
Stevie Edwards
Anne Graue
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
Beth Houston
Lynn Levin
Susan McLean
Joanna Migdal
Zara Raab
Leslie Schultz
Joyce Wilson
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| Brittany Vogel is an award-winning, New Jersey-based painter known for her bold color and beautifully expressive line. Her Powerful Women series has struck a chord well beyond the gallery walls, earning inclusion in multiple exhibitions including a Monmouth Museum x Smithsonian Exhibition and coverage in numerous press outlets, including Yahoo! News and feature spreads in TapInto and 07030 Magazine.
Vogel's work lives in public spaces as much as private collections. She created a 12-foot interactive mural, Suffragists Marching, in the Columbus Circle subway station, and has delivered artist talks at the Bruce Museum and the Hoboken Historical Museum. Her achievements include the competitive Merit Scholarship from the Art Students League of New York and features in three consecutive Monmouth Museum Annual Juried Exhibitions. She has mounted solo shows of both her Powerful Women and Order vs. Chaos series in New York City and New Jersey.
Whether she's covering a subway wall or a canvas, Vogel's aim is the same: command attention from across the room, then reward a closer look with a rich, layered story worth lingering over.
Brittany continues to paint, exhibit, and expand the Powerful Women series from her studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, adding new women and new stories to the collection.
For additional information, please visit www.BrittanyVogelArt.com.
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