Gift Book

Still shopping? Here's our contribution to the holiday coffee table in hardcover and paperback

Mother Forgets "Church"

mother forgets “church”
and a hush smothers us

in her brain’s atrium
a processional of tangles
son brother husband father

where’s the church and where’s the steeple

she wanders through the basilica
to the transept of a cross
all dressed up since 2 AM

The Centrifugal Eye

We're pleased to have a collaboration in the new issue.  Thank you, Eve!

Painting & Poem

the last word
and you inch toward your edge
as my hips roll away
under the green blanket.
i hug myself
with bramble arms
and know that
everything is changed, except
the moment when the earth,
the fertile soil we so thickly planted,
cracked with drought
and swallowed hard.

Sleep

Poem Made of Sleep

 

Lower your limbs into it
like a bath, your spine repeating
the blue wave of your lashes.
A tear made of the day
escapes onto your cheek
like the slow start of rain
and your fingers curl slightly.
Around what? The street sounds
outside your window fade away,
also refusing to be held.
This is the moment
you are most alone, listening to
the systems inside you, your thudding
blood, chest rising and falling,

each breath stretching like a yawn.
There's no fear of the numbness
that creeps through you now,
 let it come,
loosening muscle, thinning thought.
Let it tell you what you already know,
in symbols and signs and implausibles.
At this hour, your mind talks in riddles
and the language is a mystery
you cannot hold past the moment
you tunnel up through the very dreams
that traveled so far to touch you.

 

Head with Red Wing

Colors ran inside me.
I could not spit them out.

They exhausted me
and when they let me sleep
it was a sleep lit by nightmares,
a key unmoving in a frozen lock.

It would be years before
the key clicked open
on an image of what my life had been.

I should have listened to my colors,
the red beating of their wings.

Shattered

The outside bore down
and entered through a single blue
fissure. Each brush stroke
had been its own allegory
and could not reconcile the break.

My insomnia was a reinvention
of what had gone before.
I felt for connection in blind corridors,
long and labyrinthine, full of whispers.

Who’s there? I worried
from within the room’s glass eye.
Maybe I was dreaming. The facts were hard
to parse and sometimes lied.
I did, too, confused by what
my reflection said. It had a revelation for me
but the glass distorted it.

Details piled up
and the fissure widened.
It arrowed in on a thin red line.
It splintered our embrace
and again I was alone.

Artist with Worried Sister

she stands up
among her broken people

counting time on fingers
bent with it

her plane was a bed
contrived of shadows

full of salt wound in sheeting
worn to shreds

like all ends of things
now orange energy lifts her

to other people's clanging yellow 
urgencies sweeping her forward

 away from the sister
who is always one step behind

Our New Facebook Page

Scattered Light
Hope you "Like" it!

Fusion

Janet and Cheryl Snell are pleased to announce the publication of their collection Fusion,a series of expressionist drawings accompanied by poems derived from the image.
Available in these formats:
Paperback
Hardcover
Free download

How the Dry Spell Ended

For months she crisscrossed
a hot dry path
until her lips split
and she called out for comfort.

The rains came and she opened her mouth
greedy for each drop that filled her.

She was a river
and fish leapt from her
until her hook was baited
and she became the worm.
 

The ear, taken by surprise
encloses the dark,
its singular humming.
Your own song could confuse it,
so keep it sotto voce.

To separate nuance from noise
takes practice: let whorls that circle
the smooth-muscled tunnel
swell like summer.

Against the drums,
a percussion of bones moves
intricate things in their fringed peripheries,
and a spiral shell, like the one you once held
in your six year old hands, twitches
with a truth you had to learn to hear.

 

YOU SEARCH FOR OUR TRACK

You are nearer now,
a flicker of light upon a spine,
floating toward me
over carousels of luggage,
through time zones
pocked with stoplights
and the bulge of alternate lives.
I wait with nerves vibrating
like colors on a map,
one stumble away
from cold fluorescence
and worst case scenarios
while you stand still for a moment,
perhaps waiting for the hour to fulfill its destiny
before you bound down the escalator,
eyes on the exit, its revolving door,
your fingers curling around the handle
of the cab that will pull you
into the roaring rush hour surge.

Escape into Life:Lives of the Artists

Thanks to Escape into Life for the nice spread about Janet in their Lives of the Artists Series. Check it out here!

Head with Covered Eye

Vein

Bad News

I open my evening paper
and a throng rises up
scything blindly through the fields.

For so many nights, I courted the sleep
that only ever comes in fits and starts.
Now, blood thuds against my temples
but it's the glint of the blades
that blinds me
until morning crawls in
to pull the darkness off.

Pandora on Amazon

The Amazon MarketReach people have selected our calendar for their LIST. Have a look! And it would be wonderful if you would leave a little review. No pressure, heh.

and furthermore...

Presenting the Scattered Light Publications 2010 calendar, with JANET'S PAINTINGS

Absence


You rise before dawn to begin leaving.
Sounds arrive from varied points of origin:
a rustle of shirts, the shuffle of papers.

All night long, I listened to jumbled words
slip from your dreams of renewal,
your endless leaving and arrival.

With one knee, you open the bedroom door,
a mug in each hand. In a moment, you’ll hold me
as close as if one of us had been lost.

I lift my coffee out of the way, trying not to spill.
You say, The phone is fully charged. Will you be alright?

The front door falls shut, key turning in the lock.
I wait for you to turn back
to retrieve the muffled answer, my lips at your ear
naming everything you missed.

Past Forgetting

Slipping Her Mind


My old aunt, rattling
our teacups, asks
Did you know my brother?

She points to the picture on the wall,
the same one I keep by my bed.

He was my father, I say,
and her hands fly to her face.

Her mind flickers off and on,
braiding past and present
in a loose skein full of absence.

I wonder what she does remember.
My father, she says, shaving his sick son.

So that she cannot see my tears, I turn
toward the window crazed with frost.

Beyond the glass, the world sinks deeper
into winter. Our tea is cold now.
Are we related? she wants to know.

(from Pandora's Box)