Leslie Schultz
Sonnets Before the Sixth Extinction
There’s evidence that the Earth has already endured five mass extinctions.
There’s increasing concern that we are poised for a sixth extinction.
I.
What does it imply when we lace up shoes?
That we’re going somewhere? Since time began,
long before history, before the span
of sapiens commenced, there have been clues
that time is not forever. Now tattoos
circle back in fashion, poignant human
graffiti, blue-prints for a tribal plan
to bang drums, call back swallowed moons, confuse
Chaos into Order with quaint beliefs
that passion moves tides, averts disaster.
Thumbs twitch, then pixelated texts are hurled
like virgins into the abyss. We’re thieves.
Our blind crimes roam while our words flow faster,
form rivers, deluge our swift-melting world.
II.
We need sonnets now. They embody turns,
point footsteps toward the inconvenient truth.
Sonnets steer away from slippery untruth,
make us face the music, though it burns.
Sonnets are shaped as perfectly as urns.
Strung with rhyme, they are balanced like tuned lutes;
their shell-forms are helices, convolutes,
testaments to roses, nebulae, ferns.
Human art can yield fruit from love and pain.
We also need to cultivate the earth
with all the care a poet gives a poem.
I ask my sorrow to instruct my brain.
I ask that death gives always rise to birth,
that life always cradles this green-blue home.
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| AUTHOR BIO |
| Leslie Schultz (Northfield, Minnesota; www.winonamedia.net) has six collections of poetry. Geranium Lake: Poems on Art and Art-Making is her most recent. Her poetry has appeared widely in such journals as Light, Poet Lore, Mezzo Cammin, Midwest Quarterly, Appomattox River Review, Able Muse, Naugatuck River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, The Orchards, Pensive, MockingHeart Review. Passages North, and Blue Unicorn. Twice nominated for Pushcart prizes, and with several past sonnet prizes from the international Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, she now serves as a contest judge. She publishes photographs and fiction; makes quilts and soups; and happily mucks about in a garden plagued by shade, rabbits, and walnut trees. |
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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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