Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
Dear Heart,
Please be my memory
When my mind is shot.
Please show some courage
When I would rather not.
Please keep beating
Even when I sleep.
Please keep repeating,
As I swim out deep
How much you love me,
How you hold me dear.
Keep on whispering
What I want to hear.
Say Yes, Dear Heart,
My Liar. My Art.
Homage to St. Edna : A Sonnenizio
What lips my lips have kissed and where and why
are lips my lips have missed, and so I try
remembering each kiss and lovely boy,
revisiting each lip and every joy
attendant on the kiss of new desire
hung upon the smoky lip of fire.
And yet I know the where and why of love
remains unspoken by my lips and tongue,
as secret as the first kiss of the young,
as chastened as the kiss of hand in glove.
And so I seek the lips I have forgot,
each kiss bestowed by love and those by lust.
It is the why and where of both I must
relinquish with the kisses I can not.
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AUTHOR BIO |
Angela Alaimo O'Donnell teaches English, Creative Writing, and interdisciplinary courses in American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City. She also serves as Associate Director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her chapbooks Mine (2007) and Waiting for Ecstasy (2009) were published by Finishing Line Press and Franciscan University Press, and a full-length collection of poems, Moving House, has recently been released by Word Press. Her poems have appeared in America, Potomac Review, First Things, Christian Century, Comstock Review, RUNES, Xavier Review, The Cresset, Pedestal Magazine.com, Die-Cast Garden.com, Hawaii Pacific Review, Windhover, and other journals. She is currently working on a collection of saints' lives, tentatively titled Saint Sinatra. Other earlier work in Mezzo Cammin: 2007.2. |
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POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
Debra Bruce
Kathryn Jacobs
April Lindner
Jennifer Davis Michael
Angela O'Donnell
Doris Watts
Marly Youmans
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Mezzo Cammin is proud to announce that The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, which will eventually be the largest database of women poets in the world, was launched on Saturday, March 27, 2010, at 6:00 PM at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Tom Field)
Visit Timeline. |
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Jo Yarrington: I've always been interested in liminal places, areas of the mind or reality that blur definition, that exist somewhere in between. When first reading Swann's Way, I instantly identified with Proust's ruminations on the space between sleeping and waking. Suspended in that glide from consciousness to unconsciousness, he seemed to find a threshold to unfettered freedom and clarity. In Brontë's Villette, when faced with the harsh realities and social restrictions of Victorian England, Lucy Snow could slip into her shadowland, an interior place of refuge and boundless possibilities. And, in Atonement, McEwan spoke to the fertile pause between stillness and motion when he wrote "the mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between moving and nonmoving, when her intention took effect." It is these elusive, shifting planes, these fluctuations in our psychic core and physical being, these changeable and charged arenas that I explore in my visual art. | |
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