Erica Charis-Molling
On Flying Trapeze
The weight of the bar in your hands as you swing
through air—your body hanging pendulous,
your heart a baby bird with fluttering wings—
dissolves in your fists and leaves you breathless.
Your knees enfold the swaying rod steadfast
as hands release, reaching into the void
toward another swinger set to clasp
around your wrists, their grasp with grace deployed.
The catch! Firm hands encircle your forearms,
your own enclosing tightly back. Your knees
unfurl, releasing your length to the forms
the circus fliers dispatch with seeming ease.
The art of flying favors skill and show,
but even more, a heart willing to let go.
What Remains
My hands will float on my chest, a still pond
of silty water, bottomless and dim.
The shoreline, distant kin with sandy hymn,
will voice my words unspoken, tangled in frond.
If silver spooning ripples and spathes will bend,
receiving what remains of vein and limb,
my soul will wrap its bone white tail as tomb,
a parabolic grace from death-cold wind.
And though my restless swinging hips release,
never opening in sanguine crown,
its cradle sinking in tenebrous repose—
I'll still have followed fog's retreat each dawn,
with thoughtful step down every trace,
to hold and free my breath until it's gone.
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AUTHOR BIO |
Erica Charis-Molling is a creative writing instructor for Berklee Online. Her writing has been published in Borderline, Crab Fat, Broad!, The Yellow Chair, Rain, Party, & Disaster Society, and Anchor, Vinyl and Entropy. Her cross-disciplinary collaborative work has been performed at Lesley University, the Lydia Fair, the Dance Complex and other Boston-area venues. She's an alum of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Antioch University.
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POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
Michelle Blake
Erica Charis-Molling
Kay Cosgrove (Featured Poet)
Anna M. Evans
Nicole Caruso Garcia
Kelsey Ann Kerr
Jeanne Larsen
Susan McLean
Claudia Monpere
Diane Moomey
Stephanie Noble
Suzanne Noguere
Linda Parsons
Samantha Pious
Barbara Quick
Leslie Schultz
Sofia Starnes
Myrna Stone
Katherine Barrett Swett
Marly Youmans
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The most recent addition to The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline is Rosa Newmarch by Jean L. Kreiling.
Marie Ponsot was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Celebration of the Timeline reaching 75 essays, Lincoln Center, Fordham University (Sponsored by Fordham's Curran Center) Friday, October 20th, 2017.
Charlotte Innes is the recipient of the 2018 Mezzo Cammin Scholarship to the Poetry by the Sea conference.
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Rachael Gorchov: Recently I completed a body of work that focused on the landscapes that define suburban office and industrial complexes, contemplating their subtle relationships with the history of landscape painting. When looking at these places I saw English landscape gardens – orchestrated nature that gave way to picturesque landscape painting. I documented my subjects onsite by drawing their reflections in a Claude Glass, a convex black mirror popularized as an observation device in the 18th century. This tool appealed to me for how its skews and bulges its reflection, making my work highly subjective from the start. I then constructed paintings in the studio based on these drawings. The three-dimensional nature of my paintings further emphasized the forced perspective in my initial drawings and required viewers to explore the paintings much like they might explore a physical space by moving around, crouching and craning their necks.
Irregular versions of geometric forms such as cubes, parabolic curves, cones and triangles comprised the dimensional shapes of these pieces and eventually gave way to my working nearly exclusively on concave surfaces and ‘rocks with cast shadows.’ I settled on these structures for a few reasons. When a viewer stands directly in front of the concave works, irregular half-spheres with the convex side attached to the wall, the paintings fill their peripheral vision for an immersive experience. The rocks and shadows, amorphous objects paired with adhesive-backed prints, are reminiscent of portals and geologic abrasions. They invite viewers to question if the dimensional form is emerging from or entering into another space. Like in other works, these pieces frame the physical space the artworks inhabit.
In 2016, I visited Europe where I recognized parallels between the interiors of Renaissance spaces and my own paintings, such as the power that foreshortening possesses in its ability to collapse and intensify space in cathedrals– similar to my Claude Glass works. This experience coincided with a visit to an exhibition in Vienna featuring renderings of synagogues that once stood in the city. This piqued an interest in contemplating architectural space in my work and prompted me to consider architectural language in my own Jewish cultural heritage. I then began a series of tondos, a Renaissance term for circular artworks, of European Jewish architecture.
Beginning with paintings and mixed-media, in these works I build a photographic image that engages the space wherever it is installed, becoming part of the architecture. I arrived at the tondo format through my own history of making non-rectangular paintings, and appreciate its relationship to reliefs and rose windows found in synagogues and cathedrals. In gathering source imagery, I rely heavily on documentation – photographs and engravings as most of these buildings have been destroyed. I contemplate the collective memory images of architectural space can reveal. In this spirit, this work depicts layered environments where scale, color and depth shift ambiguously, revealing experiential space.
I consistently begin works by looking at a particular subject because of an art historical or personal association, and then through a process of extracting details from their surroundings using an accumulation of marks, color and a tactility, I sacrifice specificity of form and place, ultimately revealing a specificity of experience as my subject.
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