Moth Art

Small moth
pressed between
a manilla file folder
and several loose pages of poetry.

Flattened transfiguration
of wings
cover poem words:
ice,
light.

No sign of pulp,
in its arrested whorl,
just the quiet smalt
I brush my hand across,

feeling blue-fanned ashes
between fingers
no better than assassins,
the silken pleasure
of body-charcoal smudging the page,
adding landscape,
sky.

-Barbara Sorensen
published in RUNES, a literary journal, December 2007

Consignment Shopping & Pedicures

So I was shopping today at a consignment shop in Boulder and clicking through the hangers with some fast-paced women on either side of me who were oozing with the zealous mission to grab the newest items off the racks. And I realized that the consignment shop was oh so wonderully snobby because they did not take certain BRANDS. Most of the BRANDS they did not take were the kind you see at J.C. Penney or Target. The woman at the check out counter gave me a list of BRANDS they accept which included the sweatshop types like: Liz Claiborne and Tommy Hilfiger. Now, I can't say for sure that these companies actually do employ sweatshop workers, however, I have heard rumors....and all this after I had just had a lovely pedicure at a spa in Boulder where the young woman doing my toes explained that to avoid toenail fungus I should pee on my toes. In the shower, preferably. She also could not entirely verify this remedy. We live in a world of nonverifications. This young woman also talked endlessly about Britney Spears and Ashley Simpson and Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and others in Hollywood and what SHE would do if she had their money and how sad it was that these people were hounded by the papparazzi and stalkers. It was altogether a relaxing pedicure because the one thing I think every thinking woman knows is not to start up a serious conversation with a pedicurist. And why would you? It's infinitely more enjoyable to talk about things and people so distant to you that when your feet and legs are being massaged with lavendar oil and lotions that smell like wild iris, you forget that you might have a disease, that your financial portfolio sucks, that you are creeping toward 50 and that you will, never, ever live like Angelina Jolie. Ah, escapism is sublime.

Favorite clips of eddie izzard

If you haven't listened to him before, you're in for a treat! Fun times!

Redress

(From the Floral Radiographs of Steven N. Meyers:
Amaryllis, Mountain Fire Pieris, Fern Forest, Rose Petals, Dogwood Blossoms, Four Callas, Foxglove Ballet, Columbine #2)

“Flesh, our one possession, the heart is its own redress.”
-Matthew Copperman

A doctor peers at x-rays
and sees what she knows:
spalled bones,
mass on a skull,
small spills of cells.
At night she dreams
these things change,
that in the morning
she brings
a patient in a milk blue gown
news that all is well;
everything is just a flower
rendered transparent.
Her hand covers the patient’s hand
and together they look at
radiographed rose petals,
wavy bivalves floating
on an invisible watercourse;
engrailed bracts
in a spring cold snap;
serried bells;
the throat of an amaryllis
in which bursts a resurrection;
mountain fire’s plain pearls;
bracken.
Someone down the long hall
calls out “butcherbird, butcherbird,”
as if in warning,
but the patient is already beginning
her walk
toward desert
where she can rest,
red soil moving beneath her feet,
pulling her in and in.

-Barbara Sorensen