Tracey Gratch
Sighting at Milton Hospital
On a third-floor window, stained with condensation,
some true believers see the Blessed Mother.
Praying nightly, beads to bring salvation,
they raise a plastic-flowered shrine, while others
travel distances to view the spectacle,
unveiled after five, not to interfere
with daily hospital business. A miracle,
some say, though the Church has not made clear,
or denied. In the parking lot one evening,
a young Fall River woman shows a photo:
It's Christ's Mother, in her home's wood paneling,
then starts her car and leaves the road show.
Ten years, this argon-Mary son survives;
today, few gather faithfully at five.
Milton, Massachusetts
Above the Tree Line
I'd noticed first a bent flag tree,
gnarled spruce and fir, a twisted wood.
Then krummholz, still--soon nothing stood
between an ice-blue sky and me.
The only sound's each shallow breath
and scrape of frost beneath my feet.
The summit, in its grand conceit,
exposed at once a cold white-death.
Windward, trees lean bare and stark,
their lifeless limbs set them apart.
Through this half-life I would depart,
as sun fell to a yellow arc.
Soon I began the slow descent--
then unaware of what it meant.
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| AUTHOR BIO |
 Tracey Gratch lives in Quincy, Massachusetts, with her husband and their four young children. Her poems have appeared in online and print publications, including Mezzo Cammin, Soundzine, Snakeskin, The Poetry Porch Sonnet Scroll, Lucid Rhythms, Loch Raven Review, The Flea, Annals of Internal Medicine, Boston Literary Magazine, Victorian Violet Press Journal, The New Verse News and The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She also has a poem in a recent anthology of Science Poetry. Earlier work in Mezzo Cammin: 2012.1. |
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| POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
 Diann Blakely
Terese Coe
Enda Coyle-Greene
Erica Dawson (Featured Poet)
Nicole Caruso Garcia
Terry Godbey
Tracey Gratch
Athena Kildegaard
Diane Lockward
Mary McLean
Mary Meriam
Jennifer Reeser
Susan Spear
Myrna Stone
Doris Watts
Gail White
Marly Youmans
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Mezzo Cammin is proud to announce the third anniversary of The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline Project, which will be celebrated on Thursday, March 21, from 6:00-9:00 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as part of its PAFA After Dark series and in affiliation with its exhibition The Female Gaze. Featured readers will include Rachel Hadas, Marilyn Nelson, and Sonia Sanchez. Also performing will be singer Suzzette Ortiz and poets from the Philadelphia Youth Movement. The event is open to the public.
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| Jean Shin: Much of my work is site-specific, establishing a dialogue with not only architecture and outdoor spaces, but also the communities that inhabit and activate them. By reinserting used, familiar materials back into the public realm, I invite a large, diverse audience to bring their own histories to the work. Through these encounters each installation forms its own imagined community, revealing new associations and meanings for ephemera, and speaking to our shared experiences.
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