the letter o by Joanne Rocky Delaplaine O: Your birth month, the full October moon, orange, rising behind oaks. O: the fifteenth letter, shown by Phoenicians with a dot in the middle, as if eyes. O: the mind waking. O slashed: the mind oscillating, just before sleep. O: on Oahu, hula dancers contain the sun. O: the primordial sound Om as it begins in the back of the mouth. O: reading, in high school, The Story of O, a woman who loses, reduces, subtracts herself to zero. O: my fear of such oblivion. O with circumflex: my father’s face when I didn’t say, Sorry. O: abbreviations; old, ocean, Ohio, order, or. O: Ouroboros snake ends where she begins. O: a love cry, a grief cry, a word meaning these two are one. O with umlaut: your saxophone, hitting high E. O: the shape of your matted head pushing out of me. O: my os mirroring. O: your lips just before you took your first breath. O: what I called out when I rocked you and our eyes were Phoenecian—O’s looking into O’s: O daughter, O snow goose, oh-no-gnome, my only O.
Plea for calm waters by Leslie harris
the abyss by Renee Gherity I look forward to seeing you my friend, you with stark black hair and one soft pink tuft, who writes of gods and demons that danced across tectonic plates which pushed and pulled between good and evil, and of their descendants who danced on the slippery gloss of marble tiles and the rough grab of alley tar,
borders
a bloodline of movement back and forth to avoid the crevice suck of nothingness.
by Fran Beard Workshop & Event Guide Summer 2016
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