Arctic Caveat
Do not arouse the snowy owl
from mothering. You're not allowed.
The wind must transmit your request
through feathers on her face which hear
your surreptitious step.
She has no broth for whooping cough.
Her egg's no cure for alcohol
or any other ill that leads
a violator down a hall
to find a sleeping nest.
Her own chicks huddle in a hollow
of rock she scraped out with her talons.
Your visits here could be curtailed
at a whim of wind, a motion filed
against your freezing hands.
Don't touch her nestling's twig of leg,
record its yellow eyes and beak.
Your research questions must be scanned
on solar disk, on treeless land
Down she swoops, she comes with news.
Don't tell her, she'll tell you.
And if you knew, what would you do?
Restore to bone lost mineral?
Make laughter less ephemeral?
Make one child well?
Feminine Triolet
A woman must face her mirror
each day and present her case.
Year after year after year,
a woman must face her mirror.
On behalf of spring, whose career
is a windstorm of willow-lashed waste,
a woman must face her mirror
each day and present her case.
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| AUTHOR BIO |
| Debra Bruce’s third book, What Wind Will Do, was published by Miami
University Press of Ohio, and she’s had work in The Atlantic, The Formalist,
Poetry, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner,
and other journals. She has been the recipient of grants and awards from
the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, The
Illinois Arts Council, The Poetry Society of America, and Poetry.
She is a professor of English at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Visit Debra Bruce's website. |
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| POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
 Debra Bruce
Maryann Corbett
Barbara Crooker
Rachel Hadas
Kathryn Jacobs
Michele Leavitt
Charlotte Mandel
Annabelle Moseley
Traci O'Dea
Shanna Powlus Wheeler
Gail White
Marly Youmans
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| Judith Taylor: No one seems to disagree with me when I say there's something compelling about these images. Maybe it's because we're so inundated by the media with narrative that is manipulated and inflated that these honest little private struggles to say something touch us at the core. The eye with which we see them now is not the eye of the young writer, and that distance is interesting, surprising. Maybe the connection between the adolescent girl and the adult woman, or the diary page and the studio wall, is closer than I think. |
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