Volume 13, Issue 1
Winter 2006

Frozen Poem, a Friday: Stilted syllables wanting form and image to savor and spew wait for some muse. It comes again. Unmapped, misshapen, blurred thought with slurred impressions of shapes, scraps of light, crumbs of touches and flecks of sound. And the landscape we share, between these peeling walls flakes, fades but remains. We long to flee the clearer surface for murkier terrain. My poetic license has expired. Off to renew it. I wait my turn, turning older and more pale. With the slightest flaunting of my vocabulary, the camera's glare and your nod of assent, I force a license smile. I think about other landscapes: heaps of imagery. Muses in constant attendance. Your absence is evident, palpable, noticed. Still frozen.

Dispersal you can have the movie ticket stubs bus transfers red dried flower in a plastic baggie china the one good chair silver frame all the photographs each and every book the crucifix with the white candles tucked inside and we can share this sorry tale. He Was Feeling Surly That Night He was feeling surly that night A little pissed off at the wife. So he said, "I can name that tune in one note. I can name that meat in one bite. I can name that game before we play it." And then he went out for a long walk. Kurosawa's Ghost Yesterday a runaway freight train, number 8888, zipped and sizzled across miles and miles of Ohio, sometimes at 70 m.p.h. No one was aboard. It hasn't been explained yet. Medusa She'd stopped washing her hair. Within a week, it was slicky string. By the end of the second week, matted and by the third, she was calling herself Medusa. Her husband thought maybe she should go back on the meds. He'd call the doctor tomorrow.

---

Copyright 2006 by Frances LeMoine - No reproduction without express permission from the author.

Letter to the Author: Frances LeMoine at frances.lemoine@gmail.com

---