Leslie Schultz
Action
My dad was hungry for TV. He ate
hard candy and buttered popcorn in bed
from stainless-steel bowls, filling his head
meanwhile with flickering pictures from the late,
late show. He liked a gritty action film
with prison breaks, one with blazing guns,
some unstoppable hero on the run;
or old spaghetti westerns, deadly calm
when the gunslinger's hovering hands—
ready to draw—might relax—or else blur
in a sudden deadly tempest of thunder,
quick fire, then lifting smoke as one man lands
silent, face up on the dusty, bed-flat street
staring at fading light where earth and heaven meet.
Bands of Brass
Music of the spheres in three dimensions,
this armillary model of the heavens
conceives of Earth as one still central point
around which all the signs and portents turn.
Our shared orb-like home, shaped as a smooth knob
of brass is embedded—cradled—by flat loops
engraved glittering glyphs of the zodiac
to calculate our ever-turning days.
I would place it, if I could, at the heart
of this lush garden of my earthling mind,
at the very center of crossed gravel paths—
aligned compass points—on a granite plinth,
and invite light from any sun, moon, or star
to point out where we're going. Or where we are.
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| AUTHOR BIO |
| Leslie Schultz (Northfield, Minnesota www.winonamedia.net) has five collections of poetry, and has published in many journals, including Able Muse, Blue Unicorn, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, MockingHeart Review, Naugatuck River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, One Art, Poet Lore, Third Wednesday, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Madison Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Orchards, The Wayfarer, and Tipton Poetry Review. She serves as a judge for the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. |
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| POETRY CONTRIBUTORS |
 Jane Blanchard
Barbara Lydecker Crane
Mary Cresswell
Barbara Crooker
Sarah-Jane Crowson
Claudia Gary
Julia Griffin
Mia Schilling Grogan
Kathryn Jacobs
Jen Karetnick
Jean L. Kreiling
Jenna Le
Kathleen McClung
Diane Lee Moomey
Leslie Schultz
Natalie Staples
Kathrine Varnes
Joyce Wilson
Marly Youmans
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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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