Lori Lamothe
llamothe29@gmail.com
Bio (auto)
| I've got a chapbook, Camera Obscura, which was published by Finishing Line Press. My poems have appeared in Blackbird, SHAMPOO, Alaska Quarterly Review, Linebreak and other magazines; I also have work forthcoming in failbetter.com and Barn Owl Review. I live in Templeton, MA with my eight-year-old daughter and review books for Mostly Fiction and Curled Up with a Good Book. |
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The following work is Copyright © 2008, and owned by Lori Lamothe and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Dog Days
Our neighbor draws a line across invisible,
warns us even a big toe
can trip the alarm between lives.
Meanwhile, my ringtone's stuck on elevator
and yes, there really is a fly
trapped on the streaky side of ordinary.
.............................................Laundry accumulates.
Spiders string guilt across unmown lawn
and a Christmas tree orange as October
daydreams about its funeral pyre.
This morning a deer leapt across expectation.
It leapt so high we felt like we were watching t.v.
As we drove home, we couldn't help
............noticing how the geraniums
kept ungluing themselves from scenery,
how the street had dropped its coat
and stepped naked into rain.
Cave of the Great Galleries
There were tales, though, from the early 1700s in which the Native
Americans spoke of "Otsgaragee," translated as "Cave of the Great
Galleries" or "Great Valley Cave."
..................................................—The Remarkable Howe Caverns
You would never guess
not from the surface.
Big block letters laid out
in stereo, white glaring on green
as if the farmer who found
rock blowing wind
is still shouting his name.
When you arrive in Cretaceous
sixteen stories down
what surprises you most is not
the way the music of water
seems so much slower than
the dripping of your own faucet,
not the schools of blind fish
threading paths through fear.
What surprises you most
is how the walls keep opening
into rooms never imagined
what was hidden multiplying
like mirrors blooming.
(originally published in Seattle Review)
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Pamela Miller
pmiller.enteract@rcn.com
Bio (auto)
| Chicago poet Pamela Miller has published three books of poetry, most recently Recipe for Disaster (Mayapple Press, 2003). Her poetry has appeared in many print and online literary magazines and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Free Lunch, Pudding, After Hours, Wicked Alice, The MacGuffin, Zuzu's Petals Quarterly Online, Spout, Dangerous Dames and Inhabiting the Body. Her awards include three Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for poetry, two First Prize awards in the Feminist Writers Guild poetry contest, and First and Second Prize in ChicagoPoetry.com’s Frieda Stein Fenster Memorial Poetry Awards. She has performed her work in New York City, San Francisco, Detroit and many Chicago venues, including the Printer’s Row Book Fair, the Guild Complex, Woman Made Gallery, WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) and the Chicago Cultural Center. |
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The following work is Copyright © 2008, and owned by Pamela Miller and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Prophecies for the Year 2050
There will be sightings of fiery spaceships in the President’s bathroom mirror.
There will be hell to pay and water to bail. Our hearts will grow as tiny and stony
as cherry pits. There will be whales in the bracken and penguins in the pines
and skies so slippery the stars slide off. There will be making of preternatural din.
The earth will evolve into fire and the water will crawl up on dry land. The trees
will be brittle as fingernails, bald as bats. The mountains will twist into cryptic shapes.
There will be really nasty rainbows as grimy as unwashed necks.
There will be factories of laughter implanted in our chins. The gargoyles on Notre Dame
will read trashy novels all day. The plague will start in Chile and gnaw its way north, then
pinwheel across the world like a spinning scimitar. Those rickety old stairs up to Heaven
will be destroyed by a fire of suspicious origin. Our leaders will be as soft and boneless
as marshmallow Peeps.
There will be creepy-looking writing on walls of light that burst from the earth at night
like ghostly fists. Our dead will return wearing nightgowns of smoke and set our
houses on fire. And they’ll howl at us in foghorn tones, "It’s all your fault,
your sticky-fingered fault!" There will be nothing left but fire and granite-hearted God,
and He’ll have bigger things than fish to fry.
(Previously published in the print magazine After Hours, Issue No. 17, Summer 2008.)
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