Friday, December 10, 2021

TONY TRIGILIO ON "WRITING WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW"


You are invited to read Tony Trigilio's fascinating essay, "Writing What You Don't Know: Poetry and the Arcane." You can see the entire essay at BIG OTHER, but here's an excerpt:

As I mention earlier, the advice to “Write what you know” reaches its limit in the presence of the arcane. To be sure, writing what you know can be empowering as a validation of the truth and wisdom of your experience. But I would suggest instead that the most productive work comes from those moments when we write what we don’t know—when, to channel Spicer again, we “interfere” with the boundaries of the known and attune our ears to what is being spoken to us from the arcane “Outside.”

More specifically, these are moments in which we interfere with the part of ourselves that doesn’t want to step out of the boundaries of common sense, that fears getting lost in the dark wood of unknowing. On the surface, it might seem counter-intuitive to welcome an alien frame of reference, a strange and destabilizing angle of vision, as we sit in front of the blank screen ready to write. But if we are to discover new ways of seeing the world, as good writing can help us do, then we might need to loosen our grip on the most familiar, ordinary parts of our everyday consciousness: “You have to, as much as possible, empty yourself for this,” Spicer says. The arcane doesn’t have to reside in outer space. Instead, it can be found among us, planted firmly on planet Earth—in gossip, scandal, and soap opera kitsch, to name a few possibilities—an affirmation of the wisdom and insight we can find when we celebrate, rather than domesticate, our most eccentric curiosities.



Sunday, November 28, 2021

DENISE DUHAMEL IN "CHAPTER ONE"


For Marsh Hawk Press' December "Chapter One" Project, Denise Duhamel shares a short statement on Emily Dickinson, which you can see HERE.


Monday, November 1, 2021

DONALD WELLMAN IN "CHAPTER ONE"!

 

Donald Wellman is the latest contributor to our "Chapter One" series which presents features on a poet's early days. You are invited to read his contribution HERE.



Thursday, October 28, 2021

CONGRATULATIONS LORNA DEE CERVANTES!

It's not yet released but it's already receiving raves!
Congratulations
to Lorna Dee Cervantes for her forthcoming Marsh Hawk Press book, APRIL ON OLYMPIA! Here's an excerpt of Camille T. Dungy's review at Orion Magazine, which you can see in full HERE:
"One of the major voices in Chicanx literature will publish a new collection this fall. April on Olympia is a keenly observed, politically charged, uncompromising tour of the poet’s mind and our world."


Thursday, October 7, 2021

MARSH HAWK PRESS PRESENTS A NEW "ARCHIVES" FEATURE ON ITS WEBSITE!


Marsh Hawk Press has decided to offer an "Archives" section on its website that provides free downloads of selected poetry selections. Inaugurating this feature is THE THORN ROSARY by Eileen R. Tabios. You can read (and teach) her first Selected Poems project through this link:

 https://marshhawkpress.org/archive/

THE THORN ROSARY presents Eileen's poems developing the prose poem form (abstract expressionism and cubism are major influences) with critical essays by poet-scholars Thomas Fink and Joi Barrios.





Thursday, September 30, 2021

JULIE MARIE WADE IN "CHAPTER ONE"

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. 

--from "Meditation XVII" by John Donne

 It's always worth revisiting John Donne's Meditations and Julie Marie Wade reminds us with her contribution to Marsh Hawk's "Chapter One" Project. You are invited to read Julie's testimony on Donne's effect over HERE.




Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize Finalist to be published by Circling Rivers!

 Congratulations to Robert Clinton!

Marsh Hawk Press is delighted to share that Circling Rivers will be publishing Robert Clinton’s forthcoming collection, WASTELAND HONEY, in Fall 2021. Robert was a finalist in the Marsh Hawk Press 2021 summer poetry book competition. More information is available at  https://circlingrivers.com/books-clinton-wasteland-honey/ but we’re happy to share the following:

 

Says poet Michael Ryan (Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize): “Robert Frost wrote, ‘If it’s a wild tune, it’s a poem.’ Robert Clinton’s WASTELAND HONEY is loaded with wild tunes. These poems, tightly and gracefully and elegantly written, make me think of the great jazz pianist Bill Evans: his riffs are essential to the presentation of the song, which is always there.”  

 

WASTELAND HONEY: POEMS offers to us the living and dying world with which we contend—or to which we surrender. Robert Clinton speaks of the devils who rob the earth, but he makes a place in his verse for the “rose-clean, vigorous, fragrant.” Contrasting tempers and riddling parables are framed by rhythms and fluency of diction that achieve a unique formal structure for each poem. WASTELAND HONEY‘s arresting and eccentric metaphors linger, like the burning touch of a thistle.  

 

More praise: 

Clinton’s language bears the stamp of pure poetry: well-wrought syntax, sudden juxtapositions, and especially a compelling musicality. These poems read as if hurtled into being by a mysterious and wondrous energy.  

—Nance Van Winckel, The Many Beds of Martha Washington

 

“Delicious paradoxes are the very texture of Robert Clinton’s refreshing and consistently surprising  WASTELAND HONEY, just as paradox and self-contradiction are all too often the texture of our oxymoronic lives. Like his “venomous anemones,” Clinton’s poems stimulate our taste buds while they unfailingly—even ruthlessly—keep our minds and hearts both off balance and alert.” 

—Lloyd Schwartz (Pulitzer Prize in Criticism)

 

With grateful nods to his biblical rhythms and fables, we enter Robert Clinton’s new collection. The speaker is in keen touch with the outdoors, both its hardships and its balm. WASTELAND HONEY is well worthy of repeated readings. 

—Sarah Gorham, Alpine Apprentice and Study in Perfect

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Robert Clinton, born and raised in upstate New York, has an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College, and has twice been a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony. His poetry collection Taking Eden was published by Sarabande Books, and his poems have appeared in Wisconsin Review, Decomp, Antioch Review, Stand, Plume and The Atlantic, among other journals.

 

Wednesday, September 22, 2021

FEATURES ON TONY TRIGILIO



Congratulations to Tony Trigilio whose book Proof Something Happened was just reviewed in issue 88 of Pedestal Magazine. You can see the review at https://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/tony-trigilios-proof-something-happened-reviewed-by-brian-fanelli/ .

Also, Tony Trigilio was interviewed about the book by Shelagh Shapiro of WBTV-LP, 99.3 FM (Burlington, VT) as part of her "Write the Book: Conversations on Craft" podcast. You can access the podcast at https://writethebook.podbean.com/e/tony-trigilio-81621.

Sunday, September 19, 2021

GAIL NEWMAN RECEIVES THE GOLD AWARD FOR POETRY FROM NCPA!

CONGRATULATIONS to Gail Newman whose book BLOOD MEMORY is a Gold Award recipient for Poetry from the Northern California Publishers and Authors! More information about her book is at the link or at https://marshhawkpress.org

For more information--including all award recipients--of the NCPA award recipients, go HERE.


Tuesday, August 31, 2021

SHEILA MURPY ON "CHAPTER ONE"

We're delighted that Sheila Murphy contributed an essay to Marsh Hawk Press' "Chapter One" series that presents poets discussing their early days. Here's an excerpt from Sheila's essay, but you can see it entire HERE.

I learned early that my mind works differently from others, and gradually found ways to navigate their signals while constructing and conveying what was real for me. Recalling what preceded and prompted my poetry stimulates the act of weaving. Poetry is composed of sound and silence, is made in privacy, and builds confidence.


 

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZES

Congratulations to the winners of this year's Marsh Hawk Press poetry prizes, as judged by David Lehman. You can see winners and finalists HERE but here are top winners:


The MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE
($1,000.00 Cash Prize and Publication of the Book, along with the Duotrope Prize)

“Rasa” by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
David Lehman writes: The author writes that “Intimacy means profoundly interior — / countless sets of keys and cryptic codes.” The book is intimate in this sense. The author celebrates the power of the imagination to multiply metaphors, as in “Tarzan Audade,” with its striking opening lines (“It’s never a good sign when the patron saint / of betrothed couples is also the saint of the plague.”) and “No Alphabet,” orchestrated by the reiterated “If not” that begins the poem. The poet’s fruitful exchanges with Freud, in such poems as “To Charette with a Man,” “Patron of Embalmers,” and ‘Handsome Is as Handsome Does,” delighted this reader.



The ROBERT CREELEY MEMORIAL AWARD
($250.00 Cash Prize)

“Morning Music” by Lera Auerbach
David Lehman writes: In the title poem and such others as “Beethoven’s Choice” and “The Strings,” the author reveals a deep and heartfelt knowledge of music, which is one source of the manuscript’s unity. Another is the bravely autobiographical dimension in the “Zuihitsu” poems that frame the collection. The poems have a Russian feel, as if they participate in a tradition established by Akhmatova and Mandelstam.



The ROCHELLE RATNER MEMORIAL AWARD
($250.00 Cash Prize)

“Vanished” by Richard Mullen
By my quick count there are 146 eight-line poems here, each complying with the requirements of an ad hoc form. The poems constantly keep one surprised and alert, as when “Thackeray, the author” considers himself “a nocturnal anomaly at his desk” and suddenly, without warning, we face “the field beyond the graves. “The humor is likeable and subtle: ” ‘I believe in science,’ she sobbed into a pillow.”


Monday, June 28, 2021

BURT KIMMELMAN ON THE POETS OF MARSH HAWK'S 2021 SUMMER READING SERIES

Marsh Hawk recently concluded a virtual book launch reading series featuring current Marsh Hawk titles by Jon Curley, Thomas Fink and Maya Mason, Edward Foster, Basil King, Daniel Morris, Gail Newman, Geoffrey O’Brien, Eileen R. Tabios, and Tony Trigilio. Before each reading, Burt Kimmelman presented a much-applauded, insightful introduction to the poets' works. These critical intros are now collected in a summer edition of the Marsh Hawk Review available HERE.

Summer of Emergence Reading Series: New and Recent Marsh Hawk Press Books

Contents

Introduction 

Basil King, Disparate Beasts Part 2 

Geoffrey O’Brien, Where Did Poetry Come From; Daniel Morris, Blue Poles .

Thomas Fink and Maya Mason, A Pageant for Every Addiction 

Jon Curley, Remnant Halo: A Map n’ Dice Chronicle 

Eileen Tabios, The Intervention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 

Gail Newman, Blood Memory 

Tony Trigilio, Proof Something Happened 

Edward Foster, A Looking-Glass for Traytors 

ABOUT BURT KIMMELMAN







ACCLAIM FOR TONY TRIGILIIO'S PROOF SOMETHING HAPPENED


Congratulations to Tony Trigilio whose Marsh Hawk book, PROOF SOMETHING HAPPENED, has been receiving wonderful critical response:


A Review by Jerome Sala in Big Other

Here's an excerpt:

"Whether or not humans have actually been captured by beings from outer space, it’s certainly true that our culture industry has abducted aliens. Such tales, which once carried a mystical, 'culty' underground aura, have now been exploited to the max—so much so that when new visions are reported, they don’t carry any more charge than the latest Elvis sighting, or worse, feel like just more clickbait. One of the many virtues of Proof Something Happened is that it captures the original wonder and terror of such tales. More than that, the book encourages empathy and sympathy with Betty and Barney Hill. Rather than ironic winking, you feel what its figures are feeling."
~

A Review by Lily Prater in Call Me [Brackets]

Here's an excerpt:

"If you love science fiction, aliens, conspiracy theories, or want to challenge your beliefs on life outside of our planet, this book is for you. . . . When reading Tony Trigilio’s poetry collection, you will feel the anxieties, mysteries, and unsettling emotions of the Hills."
~

We're also pleased to present Tony's Playlist essay in Largehearted Boy.


Enjoy your reading, and we hope you check out Tony's poetry collection!



KIM SHUCK ON CHAPTER ONE

Kim Shuck discusses inspiration for Marsh Hawk's "Chapter One" project. You can see her thoughts HERE.


For an Index to all Chapter One contributors and contributions, go HERE.


Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Philip Lopate is June's Featured Poet in Marsh Hawk Press' "Chapter One" project that discusses early influences and inspirations in established poets' developments. You can go to his essay HERE.



Sunday, May 30, 2021

VIDEO RECORDING AVAILABLE FROM SUMMER READING SERIES

You are invited to see the recording of the second session of Marsh Hawk Press' Summer Reading Series. This event features readings by Thomas Fink & Maya Mason, Jon Curley, and Eileen R. Tabios with Introductions by Burt Kimmelman. The website features link and password at this link.

Friday, May 28, 2021

MARSH HAWK PRESS' SUMMER 2021 READING SERIES

Marsh Hawk Press is launching a new reading series for Summer 2021! Here is the UPDATED schedule:

Friday, June 4th at 7:00 PM (EST), June 11th at 6:00 PM (EST)

June 4th: Geoffrey O’Brien, Dan Morris

June 11th: Basil King and Ed Foster


If you are interested, please email us to receive an invitation: mheditor@marshhawkpress.org




(click on images to enlarge)

Archives:

Read May 21st: Tony Trigilio and Gail Newman




May 28th: Thomas Fink & Maya Mason, Jon Curley, Eileen R. Tabios 




Tuesday, May 18, 2021

SUMMER 2021 READING SERIES COMMENCES

 For an Invitation send an email to us at: mheditor@marshhawkpress.org


HERE is more information.




LYNNE THOMPSON FEATURED!

Here's a lovely profile and interview with Los Angeles Poet Laureate and Marsh Hawk author Lynne Thompson at the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Blog. Here's an excerpt:

 I definitely see the creative practice as possible for those working outside of the academy or in roles more traditionally associated with the arts. As in all things, you have to make room for the creativity to blossom. And in making that room, one has to accept that the road to crafting something—a poem, a painting, a choreography—may necessarily take longer than for one who works in their field, sunup to sundown. In my case, I left the practice of law where I worked as a litigator to take on a job where I could use my legal background but in less (ok, slightly less) of a pressure cooker. That change allowed more time than I previously had to address the craft and art of poetry in private workshops and by attending conferences. Having done that, and finding myself in the role of poet laureate, it seems important to bring the message to those working in roles or living in spaces that seem to be anathema to creativity of my experience and to provide some encouragement that recognizes there are always ways to pursue “the dream.”


 

Friday, May 7, 2021

"CHAPTER ONE" FEATURED POET: Gail Newman

Gail Newman is our featured "Chapter One" poet for May. You are invited to read about her writerly beginnings HERE, but here's an excerpt:

"I think about poetry, kindness, the earth. Resilience. How much we have of beauty. Why we need to remember the past. Elie Wiesel said–

"Whoever listens to a witness, becomes a witness."

Monday, April 19, 2021

NEW REVIEW FOR GAIL NEWMAN'S BLOOD MEMORY


Joan Gelfand reviews Gail Newman's BLOOD MEMORY for Wilderness House Literary Review! You can see the review HERE but here's excerpt:

In “Blood Memory” we see, if not for the first time, then with a fresh eye, what the sun’s curative powers can never heal: deep scars of a history so devastating that artists, writers and musicians are still engaged in mining its terrors and complexities. The Nazi Holo- caust has produced libraries of books and in 2015 produced yet another Pulitzer prize (“All The Light We Cannot See.”) The mass annihilation of Jews, homosexuals, Christians and Gypsies haunts us still.

...

Marge Piercy, the esteemed Judge of Marsh Hawk Press’ 2019 poetry contest chose “Blood Memory” as winner. From Piercy’s comments: “Writ- ing about the Holocaust can be difficult now, not that it was ever easy. It has become myth or something people use as a metaphor for something they object to; those who know, who went through it are dying off. Those who deny what happened multiply. To make fresh, powerful poems rooted in the Shoah is amazing.”

...

“With its publication, “Blood Memory” joins the pantheon of exceptional writing.”





REMINDER: MARSH HAWK POETRY PRIZE DEADLINE = APRIL 30, 2021

The 2021 MARSH HAWK PRESS POETRY PRIZE

CONTEST JUDGE: DAVID LEHMAN

($1,000.00 Cash Prize and Publication of the Book. Additionally the winner receives a $100.00 Duotrope Gift Certificate)

The ROBERT CREELEY MEMORIAL AWARD

($250.00 Cash Prize)

The ROCHELLE RATNER MEMORIAL AWARD

($250.00 Cash Prize)


Go HERE for more information!



Friday, April 9, 2021

Edward Foster DISCUSSES A LOOKING-GLASS FOR TRAYTORS

A Looking-Glass for Traytors, by Edward Foster. East Rockway, New York: Marsh Hawk Press, November 2020. 88 pages. $16.00, paper.

You are invited to read a wonderful conversation between Peter Valente and Edward Foster over Edward's latest Marsh Hawk book: A Looking-Glass for Traytors. You can see the conversation hosted by Heavy Feather Review HERE, but we also share an excerpt below.

from: A Conversation with Edward Foster’s A LOOKING-GLASS FOR TRAYTORS by Peter Valente in the Heavy Feather Review (2021): 

In Foster’s poems the Beast can be understood as Pan; the quote from Walter F. Otto’s Dionysus: Myth and Cult, in the beginning of Foster’s book, states: “Dionysus, himself, who raises into the heights of ecstasy, is the suffering god. The rapture which he brings rise from the inner most stirrings of that which lives. But wherever these depths are agitated, there, along with rapture and birth, rise up also horror and ruin.” Here I mean to suggest the dark resonances that operate, in secret, deep inside these poems, manifesting their energy in the language, and are beyond good and evil. Pan stands for the dark energy of sexual desire and nonconformity. Any form of authority must be resisted. And in the end, after all is lost, and seemingly only despair remains, something remains, there, in the wind, the changing breezes, in the drifts of snow that cover the fields, in the cold, in the silence. It is dark and you cannot see where you are going. You can’t go on, but you go on. That is the closest thing to freedom. Nothing is still, all is moving. That is the god speaking. Nothing will be remembered. Even the poem itself may not be remembered.

 

For Foster there are moments in life when we can escape the ego, and emerge, as if transformed, but this is not because of the mind, but the body. For Foster, at these moments, “Suffering and the past no longer invade the soul, and nothing is left, for the moment, but freedom ‘in the tearing wind.’” This is the liberation of not being bound by anything, where you remember nothing, regret nothing, move as if outside life itself, not bound by anything anyone has ever said, or one’s memories, or any acquired knowledge; one enters oblivion, willingly; one burns with the speed of the wind, tearing through space, until one is nothing at all, stripped of everything; one is perhaps then just a pure light entering the final darkness that will consume all. Edward Foster’s A Looking-Glass for Traytors is a kind of roadmap of this forbidden territory; it is a place where the god Pan rules.



Friday, April 2, 2021

DOVELION by EILEEN R. TABIOS: THE MARSH HAWK CONNECTION

Congratulations to Marsh Hawker Eileen R. Tabios for releasing her first novel, DOVELION: A Fairy Tale for Our Times. The public is invited to her book's virtual launch tomorrow (Saturday, April 3)--for more information, go HERE. While the book is a novel, Eileen also considers it a “poetic text,” which explains the presence of so much poetry—and Marsh Hawk poetry—in her book. Here’s a summary of the relationship between Eileen’s novel and Marsh Hawk (& other publishers') poetry collections:


 

DOVELION: THE MARSH HAWK PRESS CONNECTION

 

"Another interesting element about Eileen’s DOVELION is how she incorporates elements of her life within the novel’s narrative. // Yet Eileen says that autofiction was not what she had in mind in creating DOVELION. Instead, she says she was trying to manifest 'Kapwa' in terms of the notion of the interconnection of all things. As a result, she says, she wanted to eliminate the barrier between the life inside the book versus outside of the book. 'Like in some theater when the actors walk off the stage and continue the play’s actions amidst the audience members,' she explains. 'I wanted to acknowledge the connection—by eliminating a division—between author and story and, later, story and readers.'”

—from Positively Filipino interview by Leny Mendoza Strobel

 

For years, Marsh Hawk Press poet Eileen R. Tabios wrote short stories that integrated poems. Most of the stories remain unpublished for not meeting her own standards for publication. But having released her first novel, DOVELION: A Fairy Tale for Our Times (ACBooks, New York, 2021), Eileen now considers those old short stories as exercises for her novel. The publisher’s book description includes this summary about the primary protagonists:

 

In this inventive, multi-layered novel, poet Elena Theeland overcomes the trauma of her past to raise a family who overthrows the dictatorship in Pacifica. She is aided by artist Ernst Blazer whose father, a CIA spy, instigated the murder of Elena’s father, a rebel leader. 


DOVELION also integrates several poems, most of which were first published in one of Eileen’s Marsh Hawk Press collections. When Eileen describes Elena Theeland's poetry, including poetics, Eileen not only made the character profess her own art poetica views but also featured poems from her Marsh Hawk books. Eileen even ascribed one of the “blurbs” she received for Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole for one of Elena Theeland’s collections noted in the novel:

 

Eileen says she is pleased by the linkages between her poems and prose—she considers herself a poet who writes novels rather than a novelist. These elements include:


--inclusion of the poem “Poetics (#1)” which is in The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets (Marsh Hawk Press, 2019);

 

--inclusion of the line “Love is always haggled” which is from her poem “Corolla” in Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002);

 

--inclusion of the poem “And what is seeing?” which is crafted from the third paragraph of the prose poem “THE COLOR OF A SCRATCH IN METAL” that is in Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002);

 

--inclusion of the blurb by Philippine poet-fictionist Alfred Yuson for Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002);

 

--inclusion of both Rapunzel poems in Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002);

 

--inclusion of an updated version of “The Wire Sculpture” which is in THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010);

 

--inclusion of the line “It need not take more than one person to bring the world to ruin” which is from the author’s poem “Mustering,” which was written in response to—and inspired by—Eric Gamalinda’s poem “Factory of Souls” which contains the line “It takes just two people to bring the world to ruin.” Eileen’s poem is in Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002) and Eric Gamalinda’s poem in his book, Zero Gravity (Alice James Books, 1999);

 

—inclusion of a poetry dance performance that is based on “Poems Form/From The Six Directions,” a poetry performance project by Eileen R. Tabios covered in her book I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved (Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2005);

 

—inclusion of “Firebird,” an earlier version of which is in Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press, 2002); and

 

--inclusion of a rippled mirror hay(na)ku poem that was published under the title “Ferdinand Edralin Marcos” in The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets (Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2019).

 

Eileen’s other poetry books are also cited—

 

Beyond Life Sentences (Anvil, Philippines, 1998) which is Eileen’s first book;

THE AWAKENING (theenk books, New York, 2013); 

AMNESIA: Somebody’s Memoir (Black Radish Books, 2016);

MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION (Dos Madres Press, 2018) and the related MDR Poetry Generator in MDR; 

HIRAETH: Tercets From the Last Archipelago (The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2018);

Eileen’s collected tankas in EVOCARE (GMGA Publishing, 2019); and

INCULPATORY EVIDENCE: The Covid-19 Poems by Eileen R. Tabios (Laughing / Ouch / Cube Productions and i.e. press, 2020).

 

We are pleased that Eileen’s connection to Marsh Hawk Press permeates her novel and congratulate her again for DOVELION! To further celebrate, we are pleased to share her two Rapunzel poems first published through Marsh Hawk:

 

Rapunzel, Enrapt

 

She locks the entrance to the turret containing a thousand diaries whose papers are yellowed and leather covers cracked. Then she feeds the key to an alligator. She is outside where ants clamber up the velvet folds masking her thighs (she actually scents grass!). She understands gloves are old-fashioned but has resigned herself to certain constraints:  it takes time for the ink stains on her hands to fade.  But she has crossed the moat. As she peers at the stolid, grey tower that she once draped with her hair, that a man once climbed, she shivers but smiles.

 

First, she must eliminate her guides. Her godfather—an emperor of two continents and the eagles overhead—has sent a troop of retired generals. She can feel their white beards swaying as they urge black stallions toward her. She can hear the horses gasp as effort glazes a wet sheen over their hides. Though the shimmer of air in the distance simply may be the temper of a summer day, she lifts her skirts and breaks forth into a run.

 

Once, a man buried his face into her shaking hands. She treasured the alien rush of warmth against her fingers as he spoke of sand, gritty but fine; of waves, liquid yet hard; of ships, finite spaces but treasured for what they may explore; of ocean breezes, invisible but salty on the tongue. "Like the potential for grief?" she asked. He raised his eyes in surprise and she captured his gaze. She pressed on, "I have read that grief is inevitable with joy." Still, she woke one day to a harsh rope dangling from an opened window, and emptiness was infinite by her side.

 

Now, she is taking the path opposite from the direction she saw the man choose when he departed. As his hands left the rope, he looked up and saw her lack of bitterness framed in the window. The forest respected her grief with a matching silence. But she had learned from the Egyptians how to measure intangible light, a lesson that revealed the earth to curve. Now, she runs and as she begins to gasp, she can feel the sand between her toes, the breezes tangle the long strands of her hair and the waves weight her skirts. And as she begins to feel his ship disrupting the horizon, a sheen breaks across her brow and she feels her lips part. Enrapt, she knows she soon will take off her gloves. Enrapt, she feels she is getting there

 

~~

 

Against Disappearance

 

After she climbed down the tower, Rapunzel looked at the welts rising on her palms. She had not expected the burn inflicted by the braided rope. Still, she allowed her tears to water the red tracks that began her new journey. For she had learned that bliss is possible only to those who first experience pain. As the salt of her tears stoked the fire in her grasp, she pronounced to the doves she felt lurking among the high branches of surrounding trees: One must fly toward the space where the distance towards the horizon can never be measured.

 

Once, a man dodged the floating spotlights of her guards to climb towards the window of the turret where she spent her days in velvet gowns, living through words she read behind covers of cracked leather. She was surprised as she had not thrown down her hair which remained pinned under her inheritance of gold combs festooned with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls. "Don't move," he ordered as he walked towards her. "I want to memorize the way you look, before your hair will fall from the pleasure I will teach you." And as the sun's departure stained the sky beyond her window, her hair fell. And her lips parted. And her gown slipped down her shoulders to reveal the silk and lace woven by those who once served her ancestors whose portraits adorned her walls. She looked at her father and nodded slightly to acknowledge the foretelling of a frown the artist had painted on his brow. But her hands rose to grasp the man tighter against her breasts as she whispered: Before the first one, how does one know sin?

 

The shadow of a dove in flight interrupted her reverie. Her tears ceased and she wiped her palms against the velvet covering her thighs. Then she lifted her skirts and danced down a gravel path whose unknown destiny she did not mind. She danced with a swath of silver butterflies who appeared from nowhere and lingered over her smile. Until an old male dwarf from another fairy tale popped his head from behind a boulder by the bend of the path and asked, "Who are you?"  She proclaimed with glee and pride, "I am Rapunzel." To which the dwarf replied, "Nonsense: Rapunzel has long hair!" And she laughed and announced as she twirled in a circle so that her skirts flared high to reveal her bare legs, "I cut my hair, braided it into a rope, and used it to escape my turret!" Amazed, the dwarf said, "How did you think of that unusual idea?" Rapunzel stopped her dance, fixed a cold stare at the dwarf and hissed like Clytemnestra: When women control their destinies, they are only exercising a law of nature.  How dare you be surprised!