Terese Coe
Nine Hundred in a Locked-Up Box
Beautiful Wylie, mystical dead,
the redhead full of penance
whom young Millay was quick to praise,
and Woolf was quick to menace.
Now their writing trumps their eyes.
Our Dickinson, the wisest,
hid her poems in a box,
her grove of grave disguises.
Nine hundred poems in a box,
and this her locked-up hoard.
Nine hundred found when she was dead:
her echo and her sword.
Seeing Saint Thérèse
The surgeon is glum: The ankle's a
critical
point.
You need a pin, a steel and silicon
screw
to keep the bone in place. It's a
ball-bearing
joint.
The woman wheels herself to the
twilight blue
sky by the wooden saint in the hospital
hall,
who stands with wooden roses over the
candles
that play on her tempera gaze and
Tuscan shawl.
The paint is dark with age. In
Carmelite sandals
in this ward of Saint Thérèse, so
like a crypt,
she stands in brown, chromatic,
sepia-lipped,
when something near her hooded chestnut
hair
stirs. She lifts and bends two
fingers,
incandescent.
Mirage or blessing, the landscape of
despair
called Earth and bone and flesh is
evanescent. |
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| AUTHOR BIO |
| Terese Coe's poems and translations have appeared in
Poetry, Agenda, The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, New American
Writing, 32 Poems, Nimrod, Measure, Threepenny
Review, Orbis, and Poetry Nottingham, among numerous others, and her first collection of poems, The Everyday Uncommon,
won a Word Press
publication prize and was published in 2005. |
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| POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
 Tiel Aisha Ansari
B. J. Buckley
Terese Coe
Carol Dorf
Jehanne Dubrow
Nicole Caruso Garcia
Ona Gritz
Kathryn Jacobs
Allison Joseph
Susan McLean
Marilyn Nelson
Janice D. Soderling
Shanna Powlus Wheeler
Marly Youmans
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| Jane Sutherland: I choose subjects that I cherish, or that spring from deep rooted feelings, or that come to me intuitively--dogs, roses, cranes, an iconic work of sculpture; and I concentrate on the details and slightest disparities in color, tone and textures in order to show how extraordinary are things we think we know and take for granted. The process of painting for me is connected to the physical properties of the subject as well as to its meanings, associations, and memories. |
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