| Carol Carpenter |
Aunt Amaryllis in the Dead of Winterread by nicolette bethel Before Detroit can shake its winter skirt free of tire tracks, Aunt Amaryllis jitterbugs under January's quarter moon while juggling her loose change usually kept safe in her back pocket. Her bulbous rump girdled in brown cotton and crinolines for over sixty years -- all that rich-veined flesh dormant through spring, summer and fall sprouts a fleck of green inside the boxed night where two husbands left her alone and barren, wondering what to be or not to be, just her tiny voice squeaks as she pushes cash register keys at Farmer Jack's for forty years and bags bananas, soup cans, skimmed milk for mothers cutting back calories every day in denial these mothers crave new bodies not wanting an ounce more while she hangs pounds of fat on her bones -- over two hundred bones converge into her into this fleshy, green stalk of a woman, into Aunt Amaryllis who unravels her layers of brown and blooms four crimson heads: One blushes the blood of birth. One gulps the scarlet moon rising. One ignites her curls of fire while the other one winks one red eye for Aunt Amaryllis who struts her green-booted self into this night of reckoning.  © Thom Brommerich When I Speak Outread by mary meriam I shall uncross my blue veined legs, unclench my hands folded against my skirt of forget-me-nots. Fingers lace like shoestrings; I shall pick at my knots until my fingernails fray and white moons at the base rise up toward the crest of a snow-capped mountain where my toes tip my feet on end as if I were the only Wall Street broker, the clear-sighted woman above the crowd my arms bare to my elbows, skin exposed as I cradle international markets with products and companies bought, sold and rocked against my flesh. As if these stocks, commodities and bonds were more than mere paper pulp and ink, more than glaciers slipping into valleys, melting into salty seas and carving out the space where I shall stand erect and drink my toast to red cedars and blue spruce that split night skies between themselves just as I, nourished on brine, shall grow taller than these trees until my head pokes through cumulus clouds and seeds the darkness with words of rain. Wicker Chair & Coreopsisread by christine potter My mother left this white wicker chair to me who knew the intricacy of the weave, the way each strand overlapped and wrapped over and under itself creating the pattern of us. There in her private place I listened when she hummed like the wind rustling leaves in the plum tree. She whistled sparrows to the ground: t-weet, t-weet, t-weet. She could make me hear the rise and fall of butterfly wings in air. Mother kept her sewing basket full of thread on the white wicker table. All colors moved through the eye of her needle: the deep blue of a jay's wing feather, the red of her blazing roses climbing the fence, the white of clouds shifting shape. From pieces of fabric, she designed my clothes, knowing what would fit, what would bring out my coloring, what would move with me like skin when I was ten and growing faster than grass. She sewed me into myself, leaving seams to let out. I watched her fingers move, the needle flash in and out of cloth as she turned flat flowered cotton into a full skirt buttoned at the waist. She was a magician who taught me how to sit quietly and wait for coreopsis buds to open into gold suns at our feet. Every year the coreopsis bloom on the same day and I place the white wicker chair and table just right. Light weaves my mother's shape in that quiet space and I hum along with mother's songs, hear leaves fall as mother performs her magic tricks and all is an illusion. "Aunt Amaryllis in the Dead of Winter" first appeared in The Carolina Quarterly. "When I Speak Out" first appeared in Potpourri. "Wicker Chair and Coreopsis" first appeared in Underground Window. Carol Carpenter's poems and stories have appeared in numerous online and
print publications, including: Connecticut Review, Snake Nation Review,
Birmingham Arts Journal, Georgetown Review, Caveat Lector, Orbis, Arabesques
Review, and various anthologies, the most recent are Not What I Expected
(Paycock Press, 2007) and Wild Things (Outrider Press, 2008). Her work has been
exhibited by art galleries and produced as podcasts (Connecticut Review and
Bound Off). She received the Hart Crane Memorial Award, the Richard Eberhart
Prize for Poetry, the Jean Siegel Pearson Poetry Award, Artists Among Us Award
and others. Formerly a college writing instructor, journalist and trainer, she
now writes full time in Livonia, Michigan. |