No Contest
The Online Magazine from GenPop Books

27 OCTOBER 09
[click here for printable PDF]

JOAN FISET & NOAH SATERSTROM
from How It Was with Scotland
   

   down the road around the bend
   follow the white bird’s wings

   hoops & sticks & skips into dusk
   one bite from the roof

   carnival lights    calliope
   one sugary shard from a windowpane

   here light expands
   on a path without breadcrumbs
   in the sky no clouds    only the house
   as it ascends
   while she waves
   then turns
   toward a face
   first glimpsed
   when the search began

   inside out
   disconnect of street and sidewalk

   don’t forget your promise

   faint sketch of a man
   rarely mentioned

   every room three inches square

   tent for grass and
   this solace you play
   with me today around the ring

   a rose the flowers begin

   someone calls
   where we do not hear
   we are not lonely
   a far away train it passes
   we take root
   just outside
   the more and more
   because that voice
   will want to know
   what we cannot say
   through the trying
   that won’t go down
   to the patch of green
   we want to believe

   can you see
   the feet and ready for running
   like a gazelle someone says

   and even though
   a pretend smile
   this coming home

   maybe we
   sit down together
   and could

   plan more tomorrow
   first one begins
   closer in

   to a table
   when eyes don’t turn away
   we live

   night birds hover
   over all we might have lived    if

   this yellow incandescence
   had adjusted to the shift

   door ajar
   close to where I stand

   the mind of a star has filled me
   astral horizon    dark command

* * * * * * * * *

JOAN FISET is a writer and therapist in Seattle, WA. Her book of memoir prose poems, Now the Day is Over (Blue Begonia, 1998) won the King County Publication Award. "After" was a finalist in the 2008 Floating Bridge Chapbook competition. She has completed "Washing Clothes in Moonlight: The War Stories of Xuan Ngoc Nguyen" in collaboration with Xuan. Her poems have appeared in Tarpaulin Sky, Wave Books' The Bedazzler, and Pontoon 2008.

NOAH SATERSTROM is an artist, writer and curator living in Tucson, AZ. He has exhibited paintings, drawings, prints, and installations, most recently in New Orleans, LA, Glasgow, UK, Bisbee, AZ, and Brooklyn, NY. His writing and text/image collaborations have been published in Denver Quarterly, Tarpaulin Sky, and Black Warrior Review. He is founder and curator of the cross-genre quarterly Trickhouse. Visit his website at www.noahsaterstrom.com

Post# 091027

Possible Genre(s): Poetry | Ekphrastic Text | Visual Art | Painting | Other

Possible Labels: Joan Fiset | Noah Saterstrom| How It Was with Scotland|