Sarah-Jane Crowson
Ghazal: Paper
The old astronomer puts out the light
and stars shine out like pinholes in worn paper.
Creating worlds in miniature (small gods)
red wasps weave minarets of reborn paper.
It's Valentines! I buy a gilded heart
that smells of stale vanilla—lovelorn paper.
Shh…velvet drapes sweep open to reveal
faint silhouettes of castles drawn on paper.
Martha stores her loneliness in jars.
She snips and folds small creatures from torn paper.
Each shelf is stuffed with wondrous gifts but what
to get? A unicorn? A shoehorn? paper?
The archivists turn on their screens and sigh.
They miss the feel of index cards, mourn paper.
Your words are candy floss dissolved in rain.
How adeptly you court and fawn—on paper.
The crows catch currents, glide. I watch one fall—
all magic's lost, it's only airborne paper.
Solstice: waiting for the Midnight Theatricals
Crow
Corvids fly the shadowy treeline, leaving
rakish trails of wingbeats & tattered squalling.
It's as if they airbrush this skyscape cobalt,
fading in starlight.
Flower
Green-gold spears of rosemary scent the blue air
crush of insects. I watch the pointed silver
stars of woodruff threading through verges, silver
stitches on velvet.
Tree
Apple trees with mistletoe clasped round branches.
Alder trees with cobwebs across their heart roots,
braceleting an underworld—soil & water—
echoes of journeys.
Mouse bones
Bones of creatures dance in the hedgerow, chorus
lace-like stories, tell me of blood & honey,
salt & amber, whisper of slant-lit August
infinite evenings.
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| Maureen Alsop:I often create visual art as a memorialization to the closure of a written work. However, many of these visual pieces arrived as a trajectory while writing a larger 'work-in-progress.' The text within the visual poems do not speak to the content of the larger work but are autonomous, acting as bridge between the written and visual bodies. The original text draws upon ghosts in the hall of battles. It is a glittering solar analemma, an unattested revolution, an infinity reflected in ellipses, omissions, and disintegration. A full collection representing many of these images came to fruition recently in Tender to Empress (Wet Cement Press). Yet the act of creating from text continues, as the digital collages here also include newer works based on miscellaneous notes, old emails, and most recently a short story, "The Unnamed Woman of Mary River" (forthcoming at South Dakota Review). The title to these are based on cargo ships which I pass on my daily commute from island to mainland. These small cities of people, afloat for weeks on end out at sea, are a looming story that embarks and disembarks in my imagination.
The visual poems are crafted under the mechanics of "Écriture Féminine," literally "women's writing." These principals advance a feminine perspective. I write from parallels, cyclical slips through stream of conscious and fragmentary processes. The writing exists as rough erotic. As talisman. Interpersonal in their ruptures and syntax, soft in their discomforts; a splintered narrative. Through writing, I can go anywhere and never be found.
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