creation

Creation

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Credits
Organized by:
Sheila Goloborotko
Poetry Curation:
Lori Anderson Moseman
Design:
Sheila Goloborotko and Hui Chen Ou Yang
Photos:
Sheila Goloborotko
Photo Editing:
Hui Chen Ou Yang
Texts:
Lori Anderson Moseman, Belle Gironda, Lisa Wujnovich, Deborah Poe, Laura
E. J. Moran, Katie Yates
Revisions:
Copyright ©2012 by Sheila Goloborotko. First Edition.
All rights to reproduction of the works of art and texts are retained by the artists and
writers. The above information forms this copyright notice: All rights reserved.
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-62050-491-8
Publisher: Goloborotko's Studio
248 Creamer Street, Studio 5 | Brooklyn, NY 11231
Cover:
Sheila Goloborotko, ink on paper and pencil, 1991

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This book is dedicated to Aubrey Rose,
whose life mirrors the miracle of Creation.
She was brought to Earth by Joy,
to be raised by two women, a dog and a horse.
Our lives revolve around her as she becomes the Sun of our lives.
Together we have been seeing much growth and transformation
and together we have been enjoying many Moon cycles.
Our tribe celebrates her everyday
and we know it will always be there for her.
Even after we all have turned back into dust
to then become shining Stars.
Sheila Goloborotko

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Acknowledgments
My love for design combined with my passion to create art in both small
and large scale was always a driving force in my life, whether creating sets,
a book, or a print—from personal tales to public art.
I concentrated my studies in Architecture and earned a B. Arch. The first
series of prints I created was an artist’s book for my thesis—an edition of
prints and objects—with social and political commentary about Santos, a
small ocean town where I attended college.
Following graduation, without prospect of growth in my native country,
I came to the United States and received an M.F.A. degree at Brooklyn
College. Since then I have been a working artist. I worked as an adjunct
professor at this institution from 1990 to 1998.
While teaching at Brooklyn College I started a Ph.D. program in studio
arts at New York University. I studied under the tutelage of sculptor
and printmaker Krishna Reddy, who developed and taught Intaglio
Simultaneous Color Viscosity Printmaking.
The images in this portfolio are a series of color viscosity prints created in
1991 and printed at the Brooklyn College Press, in a semester of Edition
Printing—a curriculum I developed. This course was specially designed
for independent studies students and focused on all steps of printmaking,
from creating a plate to running an edition.
New York University cancelled the Ph.D. program in Studio Arts.
Although I was unable to complete this program I am forever thankful

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to Krishna Reddy whose groundbreaking work introduced me to
revolutionary printmaking approaches that influenced and continues to
change my personal oeuvre. Krishna showed me that there are no limits in
printmaking—and that “a print is a book of one thousand pages.”
I am also grateful to all the students who showed up to class in time and
helped me develop this course, expand the boundaries of Brooklyn College
Press and with me printed this series.
To look at this suite of prints two decades later sitting next to Lori
Anderson Moseman is to recreate a new landmark in my personal
history. Lori—a soulful writer that makes every letter sound special—is
responsible for curating these five fabulous contemporary women poets.
With her vision, this project became in itself a new myth in Creation—a
contemporary collaboration. My infinite thanks to writers Belle Gironda,
Lisa Wujnovich, Deborah Poe, Laura E. J. Moran and Katie Yates for
their generosity with their art, time and passion.
This project could not have taken the shape of this book if it was not for
Hui Chen Ou Yang, my studio’s intern who invested in this project her
infinite love for design and poetry. Her endless patience, attention to
details and creativity is remarkable.
My special thanks to my family who shows me everyday how to create a life
filled with new myths and love.
Sheila Goloborotko

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Creation
Aquatint, engraving and deep bite zinc plates (4)
4” x 4” each, 1991

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Creation

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Creation
Color viscosity etching, 20” x 16”, 1991
Edition of 100

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Myth Cycles
Myth is a poet’s math, an algebra by which bards mark-up beauty.
Leap by leap, poets enter a mire to (e)merge as collective pulse, as open
mouth, as abacus recounting human stories stone by stone. Myth is a tool
that outlives all who toy with it. Eons ago, when Sheila Goloborotko etched
these zinc plates to enact Native American legends, ethnopoetics permeated
doctoral studies. We learned tales attributed to this continent’s first
human inhabitants; we reiterated ritual cycles brought here in unending
waves of migration. Such pathways helped us scrutinize our lives.
Still, in my community, literary critics—Resistance Post Modernists
—protested our poetry performances. To “contest” our cultural appropri-
ations, they stood, disrupted our reading, claimed our ludic play could
never change material conditions of women’s lives. Yet, even if we poets
were to forsake Jung—or Marx—to align ourselves with these critics (which
we sometimes did), there was no way to sever myth from words. Women’s
labor is already layered into language itself. If not in alphabet or ink or
image, then through the creation process itself. If you doubt this, just watch
printmaker Sheila Goloborotko in action.
Commissioned in 1991 by Brooklyn College Press, Goloborotko
made these color viscosity prints under the tutelage of sculptor/printmaker
Krishna Reddy. Goloborotko layered zinc plates with asphalt then sculpted
it. Adept with dremels, needles, roulettes and burils, Goloborotko carved
the sun, earth, moon and stars as she encountered them in Cherokee,
Wasco and Snoqualmie oral traditions. Then, she let acid eat. Myth
rematerialized as gesture. In the intaglio tradition, she spreads ink then
wipes the slate clean. She inks and cleans, inks and cleans, reinventing

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totems as she goes, rolling color out in differing densities. Oils slip
material conditions. Voila! In a mysterious melding, earth is new. Again.
Again. In a web, with her spider at our ears, we are owls reading the stars
of her awl.
The following poets first gathered after Federal Disaster #1640—
the worst of three 100-year floods along the Upper Delaware River. As
a healing ritual, I started a reading/exhibition series. Our salon spot,
Stockport Flats, is a ancient gathering ground: Munsee (Wolf Tribe of the
Lenape) camped here for at least 700 (artifacts suggest 3000) years before
Europeans settlers ousted them. Their creation story, recorded in a 1679
journal by Dankers and Sluyter begins: the elder “drew a circle, a little
oval, to which he made four paws or feet, a head and a tail…‘This,’ he said,
‘This was or is all water, and so at first was the world or the earth when the
tortoise gradually raised its round back up high, and the water ran off of
it, and thus the earth became dry.’”
Sleeping in dirt at water’s edge, protected by oak, hickory and
cherry, I had hardly begun my stewardship of Stockport Flats when a
tornado delivered a wolf—one stinky, feral, pregnant shepherd-mix we
called Delaware. Curled under a barred owl’s white pine, this fierce hunter
taught a gentleness only her species can teach. Her pups—little foxes—
banter with bears, taunt beavers, befriend fawns. Bald eagles bless the
berries, beets, and garlic that abound in a starlit meadow where Munsee
once planted flax. Goloborotko’s lush prints are literal—a landscape where
dreamlife is as fierce as wind, as fluid as spring’s shad runs. We each
inhabit art from where we live. It is how we live.
The word-wizards I summoned here are educator Deborah Poe,
organic farmer Lisa Wujnovich, Aikido expert Katie Yates, new media
specialist Belle Gironda, and spoken word champion Laura E. J. Moran.
Each of their lives is intense enough to stake a heart to a spit. Their
collective poetic bag-o-tricks will make Coyote jealous. We begin with the
full myth cycle by Belle Gironda who recently returned from several years
in Cairo where she lived just blocks from Tahrir Square. It is hard for me
not to read the Egyptian revolution in her words or to conjure hieroglyphs
I fingered when visiting her. Myths are embedded in words even if we try to
draw lines to banish them.

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—Impossible to tell what were the numbers as the crowds extended in
several directions radiating off of the square away from the dog shadows
and onto the side streets. Into the river. Milky with barbed wire stars,
howling mouths.
Earth harboring Regrets about the owl, memories of the owl, the equality
of dust and the owl. Groups of men forming and the owl Sea departure/
owl Xenophobia owl.
Sun
Safe, bowl, Drilling, Drainage, Drugs, libraries, Atum, spider of
imperative.
flayed Moon: Bird walks into a drainpipe. Low growl.
We are something eager, uncamouflaged unquick, un-fox, undoing in a
slatted land.
Belle Gironda

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Of the Earth
Aquatint, engraving and deep bite zinc plate
7.75” x 8.875”, 1991

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...of the Earth

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Of the Earth
Edition of 100

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After of the Earth
Strung up in night sky, I divide into flesh, sun-stricken awake. Gravity
practices resurrection, dons clothes, drinks tea, brims words with wary
emotion while ritual breathes cells into conversation. The container
emerges: feet a slab, calves plaster, thighs stiff mud, softening over
verbs: lift, pull, straighten, open, roll into a pinch pot. The vessel widens at
the pelvic bowl, heavy porcelain yawned with fruit I’ve forgotten: round
plums, gnarly grapes, warm mangoes. My earth center softens, spins a cave,
cages an underground dog. Hum through the bars. Free pigeonholes.
Unlock jaws. Roll over.
Here I come, respiring clay figure, ready to scoop up the day, like the first
human fashioned in the Bible, or the child of woman and fish that Someone
Powerful created after seven days and nights. Who are you Fish Father?
Salmon, bass, one-celled sperm shooting up stream? Incomprehensible,
like love, we cling to your origin: in the beginning, once upon a time, shrugging
off incest, because we all have history, and have to start somewhere. Left
to our ways, the ancients knew it would tumble down, back to Earth strung
up afloat, no solid footing, breath a drowned memory. Four Directions
staked and waving.
Lisa Wujnovich

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to the earth
grab the point of four rawhide ropes gather above the four sacred
directions. lift. hold the sky like transparent tent. see through. ropes tied
off to ceiling of sky. the sky is made from the same rock a small girl will
later break open. quartz. when, not if, the ropes break, all things living
will die. when, not if, the white man breaks bigger stones. before above
rainbow and water that was the landscape below, the living creatures lived
crowded. water beetle scout. the creatures knew long before you life began
with earth rather than the sea. water beetle dove down and brought back
mud she spread to make this earth. dirt from the steam mud hatchery.
someone powerful refastened the sky. bodies waited for earth and a
hardening to hold them. grandfather buzzard flew down to solidify loess
while the owl watched above. cat and fish and still the sun a she. when the
buzzard flapped his wings, he made the valley. when he raised them above
his neck, he created mountains. at last the animals descended and formed
a path toward the sun. a road it could tie from east to west. everything the
shade of crayfish. cats mostly color like sky. put the sun higher, creatures
asked of the shaman. someone powerful told plants and animals to stay
awake for seven days before creating humans. animals fell asleep. the owl
and the mountain lion remained awake. the gift of sight to hunt through
the night. cedar, pine, holly, and laurel were alert. they wouldn’t lose their
hair and stay green all year. someone powerful made a man and a sister,
and the sister was poked with a fish. she had a baby. soon many babies were
being born so many seven days later someone powerful made the women
give birth to babies once a year. now, there is still another world under
this world. you can reach it by way of a spring. you need the underworld
people to guide you. the woman and the fish and the owl. the moons and
the stars and the plants. but when the white man breaks open those rocks.
ten thousand ropes, directions. the mountain lion remembers blue sky.
memory resides in his skin. sun’s path lit up by arrows. this is the life of no
loneliness. lines break across the earth. her leg stretched across the owl’s
head. she births a baby as the ceiling flies over. rainbow running behind
and above the waves. cells in steamy mud pots, and not the sea.
Deborah Poe

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Earth
Once, in a tiny sea, howls washed over our cells; frequency, literally waves,
pushed and pulled our mush into prints. Sound proves our fingers,
patterns map mother-song in our tips, wave paths leave ghosts on what
we touch. Yes, you. Come close. What whisper figures your voice, hold
my ribs, they tremble in tune. How do I know where you have been? What
direction you lose? What pebble, what beach, what steel street? I cannot
feel, only hear now, tiny hammer, tiny drum echo in the cave and I behave
as such, wrench orbits, fling teeth, throw a holy tantrum when it is too
dark. Too dark, crack this cold, rub sticks and flicker. Drive fur to sit, roll
over, obey. We lost two legs and all our wings. We are too much woman
and too little whiskered, feathered and finned. End, let beginning come.
Laura E. J. Moran

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Our Partitioned Earth
Those Who Came Before buried their dead upstream facing west. We too
partition direction with wolfhowl or birdcall. Wild game: X marks the
spot. Barred Owl (Old Eight Hooter) waits to prey until Hare hops down
our gravel lane—path of least resistance. Not long after words show up,
Mountain Lion (Hardy) tells it all as Fire begs Moon to serenade an odd
accordion: full-blossom Laurel and berry-laden Holly stay awake long
enough for Ropes of Heaven to strike a chord: you get a rod, and I’ll get a line,
honey. Sun stays high enough for Trout to spawn. So cold our water. Poked
by Shad, Sassy Sis gives Dude more than one son.
So it goes. An overworld dances on. An underworld hoards elemental
power we’d be wise to leave alone. Just layer yourself in, season after season.
Tectonic plates could be read as a reversal of surface play. Use sediment
as scent or sentiment as true grit. Fight the frackers. Someone Powerful
is saying Something somewhere. The sum of it: spring water is warmer than air
in winter, what we drink determines the quality of light we got to guide us.
Are we humans the only mammals who will skin themselves alive to become
a drum—a dull drum, making pebbles prance in just a few pockets?

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Earth ~
The relevant and the gorgeous jewel of earth-besides-the-sea and earth-
under-the-sea. Copper, pieced together with fortune, the clean lisp of
cucumbers and soil. The births, the fish, the incisions. The superfluous,
the fluid mothers and their skin. The skiing warmth of children kayaking
and making dew. Wealth + Spirit * Love. Blossoming. And even.
Rosemaries.
Soft. A light. Gesture in old fabric. Lace. Sunlight. The trick of turquoise. The rotary blade of
midnight. The lust of the sea.
Katie Yates

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Of the Sun
7.75” x 8.875”, 1991

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...of the Sun

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Of the Sun
Edition of 100

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After of the Sun
In the beginning there was darkness. Animals blindly clashed and grumbled,
what this world needs is light. Clever Fox figured out that light hung on the other
side of the world and couldn’t resist bragging, sparking the first coals of
envy. Nonchalant Possum knew death well enough to play stiff with bared
teeth and putrid smells wafting from his anus, so unafraid, he volunteered
to get the coveted fire. His confidence rose from deep within, where to
this day his cells remain immune to rattlesnake and cottonmouth venom.
When he transported fire with his tail, he underestimated the sun; if
you look at his naked appendage, you can figure out the rest. Handsome
Buzzard cruised the sky as usual, with effortless v-shaped acrobatics,
pitying those who wasted their energy hunting and nest building. Why
work if you can scavenge and vomit? With his keen nose, he smelled
opportunity: he would carry fire on his head like southern women balance
baskets. He would even win the respect of smart aleck Fox. Arrogance got
the better of him, though, and his beautiful head burned to an ugly red
jowl. By this time Grandmother Spider was tired of working in the dark
and yearned to rest in light, so she said, “Let me try!” She wanted to use
an idea she’d gotten watching humans carry water in leaky baskets, so with
spittle she spun a fine silk web and adding dirt, formed a clay pot. When
her sticky web reached the sun, shiny in a tree canopy, she scurried and
stole just enough flame to fill the pot, which hardened like rock. Proud,
she skipped back and let sun loose in the sky, but not before spreading
flames for cooking, heating, tanning, and her new found passion, pottery.
Lisa Wujnovich

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to the sun
octagon inside of an octagon five times weave a paw paw
color at dawn ( spider imagination a photographer’s attempt color
of dew ) eight legs it took to spin spider silk
most durable hold known grandmother an orb weaver with how
many spinnerets spider wonder stare through its web like one
grand window how that contemporizes the tale behind this
texture pale colors pastels clouded by involvement
spider she’s got three stripes she’s clever and full
spiny legs don’t stick to the web
still the pot will be bigger than her and in ways last longer
possum has a bald spot
because he tried to steal a piece of sun buzzard’s head
always smooth because he tried to swipe a fragment too
spider
took longer but she made a clay pot wall of earth
she spun her way so tiny
in the scheme of things no one noticed
she snuck away with sun in clay pot
and returned to gift them the sun and the fire and the making
Deborah Poe

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Like Some Safety Net
Spider-chatter in this Doug-fir hollow is simply sun-struck filament
that says: spit. Riverside, I hear web’s dewsong all afire each dawn.
Lore listens best if coydogs run ahead so my footpath can meander.
Lore glistens best if I wear Grandma’s asphidity bag to ward off
tick-borne flu or just dump thought. This is no secret. Organisms’
compulsions glow without spotlights. If heat’s your goal, I can char
a log with the best fire-eaters. No grandma of mine had a mouth
small enough to go unnoticed. Grandma No Legs’ loom sang warp
weft warp weft, damning any ham’s to-be-or-not-to-be soliloquy.
We can change how we bury or carry light only so little without
crossing borders like Heaven and Earth. We two-legged walk
couplets so juxtaposition crosses time|space. We two-legged count
legs|eggs of others so as to map, to trap. Our local wood turtle
would climb a garden fence for fresh turned dirt—her urge to spaw
is neon. Hardwired, all of us, that is our safety net. Breathe. Bark
beetles get a hard back that spinning spiders don’t. Human will
can’t outflash genetic paths that crisscross genus or genius. Hybrid
hack, I’d give any anthropod a carapace if it would string us along,
ease a cat’s cradle over the abyss my mentor plunged into. I would.
Some safety net, her well-metered line homespun to an early grave.

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Sun
Son. My last instance. My love. For you. The plaid at night. The wind
and its wildness. Your world as a harp. The seals that leap for you. The
ground, its flowering ferns are in a pot for you. My first insistence. My
sister. Jewel. Liberation. And wealth. The least of it.
Persimmons in lemon. Quick. A quiet lie. A band like a wedding band. The solo lap steel’s song.
Katie Yates

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Sun
The desert surrounds the city like water. Each day is a complete journey.
Take the boat, until the bridge forms.
______
Dew on the common ground between filament and grid.
Belle Gironda

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Of the Moon
7.75” x 8.875”, 1991

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...of the Moon

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Of the Moon
Edition of 100

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After of the Moon
This is. We are. Valley moon who drinks from the rocky bowl lip, teeth and
bone worn to nubs: shared mountain. Moon woman laps at ice and cradles
shadow, no glare here. The artist digs plates, makes prints, while my
daughter digs into my womb and swims, a fish eating the moon from the
inside out, pressing pain and pleasure core, my trunk, my forest, my root.
My creation story is a serious reaction child, a moon woman bleeding.
My young moon dreams, not like the sun, serious my moon. Spider webs
spin over the sink, troubled viscosity, in my mountain moon myth, little
henchmen soldiers, in my moon camp, silver tents; spirit soldiers in
waiting. They could build ladders to sky, carry Fox, loner who crosses the
road at dusk while I drive my daughter girl woman and wait while Fox
watches, more fox than before or since, stealthy, quiet, watching, but not
watched. Then the gift on the roadside: perfect Red Fox, still, not awake,
not sleeping. I turn around the car to lay unmistakable beauty in the
trunk. Home, I hang wily death above the dogs, a sack wedged in hemlock
branches, eyes watching until the burial time comes. And then another
gift: angry winter drive, and an uncut log pile stops our arguments cold,
a watchful fox mother, then one, two, three, no—four baby red foxes test,
climb, in and out and on the wood, weaving in a jungle gym. And at each
pass, I look, hope for a glimpse, half-believe I made it up, while at home,
blue jays descend with outlaw swaggered flight, garish welcome, cobalt
against pale gray. Not like diligent beavers, swamp builders, carrying load
after load, spreading water in the forest, like a picnic lunch. So, desiring
the stream unchanged and appeasing our guilt, we allow the exiled grandson
to trap the beaver, on what we know was once his land, turning a deaf ear
to metal piercing a leg, drowning the swimmer and then dark gifts: broken
mind, unexplained illness, and my daughter’s three cracked bones. Like
the bitter chewed cedar leaves of childhood, we know truth, the valley is
not ours, but theirs and ours and theirs and the beaver will not resurrect
after caught, skinned, and stretched while cloudy moon snores. Fallen
moon, you are the still mountain, what’s left of earth’s boney vertebrae,
half man reaching upward, half woman reaching downward.
Lisa Wujnovich

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to the moon
[snow qualm] chief of heavens. night sky more moss than black. pacific
northwest evergreen. trees raised like ridges or forest regions. fox and blue
jay found their way up rope (anchored to beryl sky). tree bark microscopic
life forms or ancient signs. rectangular trunks stand on edges full of age
and light. waxing night. crescent dangle. a cup palm-held on its heavy side.
blue jay a grand tropical bird tucked on a central limb. clever beak poke
holes through underbelly of the blue. a trunk red on neighboring tree.
sun hovering low near horizon. in the world above the sky’s floor is the
other world unseen. there is a lake and the moon. snoqualm and trees. fox
can transform himself to beaver, and beaver can transfigure from skinless
back to skin. beaver gathers cedar, pine, and fir under one armpit, moon
tucked under another. mountain bathed with yellow flare. little golden fox
brought down the light. hear him howling. rapt blue jay head tucked down.
between the moon and the sun, pink glows around rims of trees. fox tail
its head’s apparition. imagine that trickery. smells like summer. mountain
look the touch of velvet. warm sound of bird claws on branches. hoot of
the owl from somewhere very high. coyotes commune in the distance. in
anger the moon tumbled with breaking rope. that breaking became mount
si. legend of mountain not the moon. breath blown at name’s end to
pronounce a people.
Deborah Poe

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Moon
Centrifugal. What keeps us in orbit, keeps us apart—magnetized stuff. Fluff,
the soft end, double ff loops are proof, I wrote to you—same, different,
companions, separate—you in your universe; me in mine, peering out a
port window. Now, before this moon cycles tomorrow, tilt your tectonic
tongue to teeth—lisp ff to ss colonially, kiss universe destiny. What we
say might manifest, stay, but how we say it ephemerally lopes off into
the dark. Fat paws on ice. Ahh. Lunatic moon. Blast-off. I would like
to fill space with new women—believe new begins again—who speak to me
in frequencies. We’d bring linen to sieve back astronauts lost through a
chink—1986—whose blasted bodies sweep asteroids, blow by meteors. We
are etched challenges, rusted scraps, recycled, spun space trash, we will last
without breath. One long howl touching howl, nose to nose, we will lose.
But as long as we leave earth, we are from it, ripple back as song echo, as
sound expands until one day we float back, an extinguished shhhhh…
Laura E. J. Moran

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The Moon I Stumbled Under
Go ahead, blame mind’s leaps on Great Falls: cousin’s open cellar steps—
that near fatal tumble to Bob’s bobcat cub. Caged purr. Weaning forever
an occasion for awe. Momentum all I muster: head over heels forever amen.
Bloody mess. My Grizzly sweatshirt is Dad’s alma mater. Just mind for once
would you child. Ok, later I can bend as if I am a river birch measuring moon’s
rise as a hillshadow carves a curve in the current, frames reflection. Duck
in lunar glow.
No wolfdog drowning a pointed buck tonight: my foxpup checks skunk’s
burrow; my herdmutt noses a chicory in firerings’ hickory sticks. Doubt I’ll
startle an hawk midprey again or greet black bears at my missing mailbox.
No grand riff of transformation to be had. Soon ropes of heaven will
drop down to snatch someone I love. We will gnash teeth until a bald eagle
swoops in to harbor a stray fawn. Mark my words with chert or quartz—no
matter. If gnomes knock,
night will be as sad as bee blight. I’ll sync breath to a ghostdog’s heartbeat—
my hand on dear Dela’s phantom belly. Waters will rise, lap-n-swallow
our longhouse. Age is changing totems. I was raven before ox, ox before
wolf, wolf before owl. (Hard to give up the snort and canines in carrion.)
Wingspan and periphery a gift I’ve yet to really claim. Fieldmice like
moonshine just fine; it is best to join in, settle on tender voles, polish my
vowels, hoot in a hollow.

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Moon +
The trick of marriage. The strength of planets. The affordable lights.
Then, the trick of mist and of giving. We have ideas the trees don’t. With
the power of anger, with the death of night. A dragon THAT is her fortress.
The waning ambivalent knitting with stone boat buttons. The strength of
Odessa, marble, windshields and home.
As in all ways the fan, a murmuring across. The foreclosed upon steps & places for sleep. Distinct
sweetness. Awfully bright. Orange-crafted sail.
Katie Yates

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Moon
A slim smile to hang a drool of star, a suggestion that we would return to
our old ways, code our fervor with phases, celebrate available light, see
them moving in the brush.
______
River force, edging, decay, black leaves, goddess of moisture in your
throat.
Belle Gironda

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Of the Stars
Aquatint, engraving and deep bite zinc plate; aluminum plate
7.75” x 8.875”, 1991

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...of the Stars

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Of the Stars
Edition of 100

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After of the Stars
The story starts with five brother wolves, a youngest, an oldest, a dog, and
countless stars like pebbles littered on a moonlit beach. Enter coy dog,
conceptual artist moving in and out of forests, trampling empty fields,
calling to chained canines. Hear his excited woman yip in the firefly night,
his restless mind churn. Curiosity leads his nose to infiltrate the wolf
pack. His hybrid intuition, smarter than the crowd’s, could have predicted
innocence would invite him: Let’s tell Coyote. He won’t do anything. Impossible for
him not to reach for the endless suns, his ancestral obsessive-compulsive
gray matter ready to lock in cyclic repetition if he sinks into the fear of not
knowing. Figures it out, problem solver that he is. Determined to touch
the stony sky, he tackles the future systematically, one step at a time. On
track, on task, his disciplined imagination pulls the bow, too many times
to count, shaft hitting tail—on mark, over and over again. A ladder of days
into nights, leads the pack rung over rung. Arrived, his dream realizes
into a dangerous grizzly’s mouth only he sees. Even as he worships his own
creation: wolves and bears spaced a-symmetrically, aesthetically pleasing;
it isn’t enough. He hangs his vision in the sky: drunk with applause, retells
his opening night story, embellishes in the telling, throwing a sack of stars
around his canvas, now framed and titled Big Dipper. His creation mirrors
his narcissism, which goes only as far as his fan club, luckily, meadowlark
loves to sing his praises, convinced he is a genius.
Lisa Wujnovich

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to the stars
the sky however was always a blue university under which wolves shared their
meat with coyote and some of the stars are school sky mind as opposed to
big sky mind what makes the blue self-aggrandized what were the wolves
up to all the stars though at least bordered red up there the wolves saw
animals that looked good enough to eat the stars at night are big and bright
deep in the heart they’re all red between the rows of arrows across coyote
built by shooting one at a time and interconnected could be a flock of
sparrows flying over or a field of sage in bloom seven grander stars garnet
as a background coyote has an attitude and could count inside some of
the stars’ sun yellow cores the coyotes and wolves climbed and climbed if
there was such a thing as fireworks for the beginning certainly there was
fire and the hottest heat scattered across the firmament animals up there
once they’d climbed found grizzly bears too many scattered lights to count
from northwest to northeast to southeast the sky is an animal’s pink from
northwest to southwest to southeast it’s gold the tenderness between the
bears and the wolves well coyote could feel it even from a distance above
all the sky is a bath of yellow starlight coyote never trusts the bears but
he trusts the image there’s a story in the picture and in the figures there
are reflections of coyote-self check the weathervane and look up bears
and wolves constellate one of the bears points to north star though the
coyote is witness he leaves his testimony to flutelike melody of the western
meadowlark ringing out across a field which can brighten anyone’s day like
ten thousand stars.
Deborah Poe

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Stars
Lovely ladies, princesses, maybe, or whatever characters wear jewels, those
women, that kind, all seven in buckskin grace, that odd, sistered pack of
‘em. Imagine golden skin, birch legs, foxes by their feet, dancing limbs,
nimble bodies join a singular chain. Spring, one claims. Anemones,
another, a third, keeps silent—the other four sleep, dreams jerk their skin.
As long as they stay close, the universe floats. But devils haunt where water
breaks, where wind licks bear fur up rock. And no small one—rock, bear,
same—giants, tall tailed beasts, teeth like jagged fence-posts. So once:
a slow forest walk, a creek-side nap, seven sisters kneel sweet praise for
petals, for pebbles, for sun, you name it—the wind. The wind whirls on
wind blows up a beast-devil snout who can’t shake human out so he hunts
and hunts, he hunts that fresh flesh down. —OH RUN! We hope, we say,
we nail-bite, we wait while the narrator sips her pipe, OH RUN! RUN!…
while smoke lingers lips... —How, once stuck, tied in limb and lope can
all seven not trip? Can all seven not climb? But they do, those lovelies,
swift, lithe, blue-black braids sway, hand over hand up, up, away from the
beast breathing steam. They climb rock, topped as far as they can reach,
the night a beached backdrop. All black. Nothing left but song. They sing
bear claws as waves, scraping, scraping, scrape and they sing themselves
huge as their stage grows smaller, smaller, small, still mammoth that bear
tears rock, huger they cling, they grow close and stuck until.... Spring
said one, Anemones said another, Jump said a third and the four others
dreamed a dark maw, lids shut, waves clawed up, seven bodies, lift. The
sky heard and touched them cold, so cold, so white, so brilliant sparkling
white, seven gorgeous wishes stuck, sky-washed, bloodless. —No, not that?
OK, I admit the story made itself up, so we touch belief, so we can map in
the dark a course, etch an arced trajectory. No: you are right—space has no
plot. We who dismiss maggots imagine thus.
Laura E. J. Moran

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Planetary Synapse Path
A wolf’s bay will take you right into the sky. Don’t be shy. Nightwalking
is sweet in this meadow. Trains stay on their tracks; my coydog makes
sure of that. The planes? Just trust: Jihad might drop a few, but don’t
worry yourself. Stars are what we came for. Red hots (sweet fire in the
mouth) trekking the bloodstream—a Gulf Stream of grandeur, crying:
Get up and go, girl. See, Coyote’s got a ladder—a quiver of arrows shot high.
You can walk for days (and nights) right up into the sky. You can have tea
(if you’re a cup-n-saucer girl). Drink with any Grizzly you come upon.
Once they turn into light, bears-n-wolves don’t fight. Nor do sapsuckers
or woodpeckers or jealous starlings. Meadowlark says it’s a matter of grand
distance, the big between. Coyote will sign his name to each configuration
(twinkle twinkle), but it’s a trick—a collapsed sense of measure. We could
blame short-sighted notions of Heaven or proported molecular make-
up. Or, we can sprawl near groundhog burrows, drink in the Dipper, let
fecund air sync with peepers until treeline’s pulse—that spring cadence—
lifts us off this very planet. So dank the record of your heart’s arc, my
straynote aria all echo.

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STARS *
—Because of not wanting to speak of them, absurd, present, remorseful,
rubies, your insight into sharpness, cradles, or depth.
—Because of wanting, wishing forth, the web-log of hope, older rosemary
beasts, the lavender bush that survived, that quiets where she resides.
—Because of sanity and coolness and statues and lust-primordial, lattice
like your hair falls, uncombed, unbrushed, the color of vanilla and
strawberrystraw.
Favored. Flavor. Cheer. Cerise. Cordialle. Length. Quilt. & Maron, Marion + Mary. Trio.
Terribly Triumphant For You
Katie Yates

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Stars
With hands and feet on the earth, her body is a sycamore ladder for the
ceiling traverse. Terror is relative.
Everything has gravity.
Belle Gironda

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Creation
This limited signed edition of 100 portfolios showcases
color viscosity prints created in 1991. Creation consists of
five numbered and signed 20” x 16” original prints on
Rives de lin (Moulin du Gue) Mouldmade in France of
85% cotton, 15% linen, 270 gsm.
The prints, title page and colophon are unbound and
housed in a clamshell box. The portolio editions were
all printed by Sheila Goloborotko at the Brooklyn
College Press during a semester of Edition Printing
with independent studies students.
The zinc plates were engraved, aquatinted, etched in
nitric acid and worked with power rotary tools. Several
color proofs were made before the final edition.

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...of the Poets

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Belle Gironda
I write poetry and experiment with video as a poetric medium. My last
book was Building Codes from Stockport Flats (2009). In 2007, my poems
converged with Sheila Goloborotko’s visual work in the chapbook, Volume
4, Number 1 in the High Watermark Salo[o]n series, also from Stockport Flats.
I returned recently to Brooklyn after living and teaching in Cairo, Egypt
for 3+ years.
Myth Oh’s
My parents’ parents tortured them with a religion that they subsequently
rejected and thus gracefully failed to inflict on my brothers and me.
Because of my father’s angry but humorous, and relatively undamaged
relationship with Catholicism, I was exposed, but unburdened, able to see
it alongside Poe, Paz or Stein, to treat it as myth and to riff on its stories
and images.
I think of myself as being more interested in mystery than in explanation,
more into animals than anthropomorphism—
Still, when I landed in the land of hieroglyphics, birds couldn’t just be
birds anymore, and I am haunted by the bodies of language that alight
on my balcony ledge. I also came to understand, mostly by osmosis, more
about ancient and on-going cluster-f**k of monotheism(s).
Thank goodness for visual art and artists—without it/them I would

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probably have written very little of any use. I am not good at making things
up (perhaps this is why myth annoys and lures me—) and so, I thrive on the
making and thinking of others, grateful and desperate for collaboration
or, some days, just for something to look at until the words come, until
the world comes.
I spent some hours this fall in the Museu Picasso in Barcelona poring over
his Las Meninas series. It was just two months beyond exactly ten years since
I had obsessed over the Velasquez painting in the Prado in Madrid. So,
I paced the galleries and I occupied the positions and I wondered again
about my on-going compulsion regarding these images. Tonight it seems
kind of obvious. These are paintings, the first one, and all the iterations,
about the conditions of possibility, about the web of relations in which a
work comes into being—creation myths.

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Deborah Poe
I am the author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats 2010),
Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008), and “the last will be stone,
too,” as well as a novella in verse, “Hélène” (Furniture Press 2012). My
work is forthcoming or has appeared in journals such as Shampoo, Denver
Quarterly, Yew Journal, PEEP/SHOW, Bone Bouquet, Colorado Review, Mantis,
Trickhouse, and Open Letters Monthly, as well as in anthologies such as A Sing
Economy (Flim Forum 2008) and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and
Prose on HIV/AIDS From the Black Diaspora (Third World Press 2007). With
my colleague Ama Wattley, I co-edit a fiction anthology, Between Worlds: An
Anthology of Fiction and Criticism (Peter Lang 2012). I am also co-editing an
anthology of Hudson Valley innovative poetry with Sam Truitt and Anne
Gorrick (Station Hill Press 2013). I am assistant professor of English at
Pace University, Westchester, and live in the mid-Hudson Valley with my
partner, the writer Karl Bode.
In terms of writerly preoccupations, moving around most of my first 27
or 28 years has made me sensitive to questions of home and belonging
related to a cultural politics of difference. This, along with my longtime
engagement with eastern philosophy and scientific thought, probably
inform my writing practice more than anything else. I believe myth-
making has always played a significant role in my writing process. I seem
to approach my poetry conceptually (being/becoming in Our Parenthetical
Ontology, science/the elemental in Elements, art and death in the last will be stone,
too, labor, gender, and cross-cultural relations in Hélène, now memory in

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“Keep”). I work best moving from the abstract to the concrete. Therefore
myth creation offers a field within which to play, to consider, to meditate,
to openly view the world, and to imagine alternative realities. Starting with
a question is much more fruitful for my writing than to begin with an
answer or a concrete experience. Has the role that myth plays changed
over time? I have probably gotten better about taking the abstractions I
see very clearly in my mind to the page. In earlier writing, I think there
was an expansive internal landscape that was frankly too internal. Readers
could not connect. Visual art also plays a significant role in my writing
process. One of my poetry collections, the last will be stone, too, uses art pieces
as points of departure for the poems. Music has always been an integral
part of my writing—downtempo electronica especially. The spatial sense
of visual art—and sound art for that matter—appeal to me greatly. So I
enjoy viewing, hearing, and feeling art to inspire my own work. I toy with
bookmaking, with painting, with the creation of mixed media objects. I
would not call myself a visual artist, but I like to create art because of the
different dimensions pieces may take.

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My poetry books are All Steel (Flim Forum Press), Temporary Bunk (Swank
Books), Persona (Swank Books), Cultivating Excess (The Eighth Mountain
Press) and Walking the Dead (Heaven Bone Press). I have two Masters of Fine
Art: one from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and one from iEAR Studios
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My Doctor of Arts in Writing is from
the University at Albany. I’ve been a forester tech, a farm reporter and
an educator. I first wrote poems about Sheila Goloborotko’s monotypes
in um daqueles lugares sublimes, an exhibition catalogue for galeria Gravura
Brasileira. My poems are published in: Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American
Anthology, Illness & Grace, Terror and Transformation, Writing on Air, Ars Medica, Denver
Quarterly, dislocate, divide, Drunken Boat, Epoch, Feile Festa, Harpur Palate, Iowa Journal
of Literary Studies, The Little Magazine, PEEP/SHOW, Slab, Terrain.org, Trickhouse.org,
Tonopah Review, Passages North, Portland Review, Praxis, Poetic Diversity, SEEDS, Sing
Heavenly Muse!, Water~Stone and 13th Moon.
Transformation—through language or image—happens in a collision
of cultures. My first book, Cultivating Excess, examines a bronze Isis at
Iowa’s Herbert Hoover Museum then leaps to a wingless Isis carved on
a gravestone in Attica, Greece. A glyph|god from Egypt crosses oceans.
To what end? I write to find out. Art(ifacts) in a physical place transport
me to a world I find through words. When I created Lintel|Gunwale to take
to Cairo: I juxtaposed Chinese dissent poet Qu Yuan (whose suicide
sparks the tradition of Dragonboating) with St. George (whose dragon’s
chain is on display in a Coptic nunnery). ((I stumbled on St. George by

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googling my Ithaca dragonboat team, Gorges Dragons.)) After visiting
shrines to St. George, I finally face Isis—in stone, as water. I am in
the Nile. Literally. As Susan Brind Morrow says in The Names of Things: A
Passage in the Egyptian Desert, “There is a thought that St. George is distinctly
Egyptian, is Isis spearing her evil brother Seth, who has turned himself
into a hippopotamus, and that that monster under the water is the rising
of the water itself, the seasonal flooding of the Nile.” Story—and the chain
of images preserving them—usher the body back to nature. That is the
pulse behind all politics. Brind Morrow concurs: “The word carries the
living thing concealed across millennia.” In the Valley of the Kings, I am
obsessed with owl glyphs. Why? Because Barred Owls helped me weather
the flood (see Temporary Bunk)? Because Spotted Owls are core to the
research at H.J. Experimental Forest where I was writer in residence (see
“Variable Poetic Cruise” at Trickhouse.org)? My training in silviculture and
agriculture infuse my writing with a scientific realism. I may want to read
Goloborotko’s spider web as a metaphoric safety net, but its biological
function as a death trap surfaces nonetheless. The cycles of the natural
world and their resulting labor|ritual cycles in human lives are the heart of
my latest book All Steel. The sun sustains us, yet, its warmth is killing us. My
current collaboration with Belle Gironda, pairs the 2011 flood damage at
River Row Books in Owego, NY with the papyri trove from Oxyrhynchus
(Bar Yusuf Canal) all the while keeping vigil for the women in the streets
of Cairo. Will the new Egypt transform their lives?

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Katie Yates
I was born in 1965 in Spain and lived primarily in West Africa as a child. I
studied writing/poetry (B.A. Carleton College, M.F.A. Naropa University,
D.A. University at Albany) and I currently teach writing to adults for St.
John’s University, Queens. In residence with my family in New Haven,
Connecticut, I lead a diverse life as a stepparent, Buddhist, writer and
teacher with an interest in wild gardens both quirky and unrealized. My
relationship with myth is ironic. Love=Hate. I think I was over-schooled in
poetry anthologies that tried to account for the history of a lyric tradition
after I’d had a more academic relationship with anthropology, a more
structured, detailed study of ritual, which drew me in more than ideas of
myth per se. As a Buddhist, visualization is an important practice. In many
ways one could say that we visualize ourselves as primordial goddesses and
gods with profound insight and skill. I have an important relationship thus
with myth, though it is a practicing/living one, and not a conceptual one.
I am not a visual artist, but I can’t or I don’t write without visual cues.
Perhaps this is laziness and timidity, my unwillingness to locate life
anywhere in particular. For example, a poem I worked on called “Poem
for the House” is a serious study of love/relationship twined together
by birds that call out, come and go. I have a fleeting sense of the seen/
overheard world and get awfully caught up in appearances.
Quirky writing obsessions by destination fly mostly towards the
handwritten note, where I try to find a balance between words and

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color=embellishment and space. I could be happy writing just notes to
people I love-all exquisitely/obscurely referenced then organized in a
series of wooden Chinese herb drawers duly labeled, fragrant, followed by
a walk with my daughter across the evening meadow.

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Lisa Wujnovich
I am a poet and farmer who lives and works at Mountain Dell Farm in
Hancock, New York. My poems can be read in the New York Organic News,
High Watermark Salo[o]n, The River Reporter, 5am, Canary Press, and Adanna Jour-
nal; my Tsvetaeva translation appears in Poetry International 2010. I have two
books of poetry, This Place Called Us, (Witness Post Publication, Stockport
Flats 2008) and a chapbook, Fieldwork (Finishing Line Press 2012.) My
anti-fracking poetry was featured in the traveling art show, Earth Stewards:
Artists Respond to Drilling in the Marcellus Shale and in 1,000 Poets for Change. I hold
a M.F.A. in Poetry from Drew University and am a founding member of
Poets for Ayiti.
The poetic process for me is akin to unearthing a dream; like dreams,
poems speak in mythic language, setting form to the amorphousness of
time, experience, imagination, and the subconscious. I have loved myths
since childhood and continue to feel at home in mythology, whether in
fairy tales, Jungian psychology, or Greek mythology. My attraction to myth
stems from my personal search to identify my own culture as an American
woman of mixed heritage. In this, poetry is a process of coming home, and
from that rooted place, a launching point for me to interpret life.
My mother is a prolific oil painter who raised me to have artist’s eyes. I
grew up watching her brushstrokes, reading the textured landscapes and
people on her canvases, while viewing her unspoken self. Thanks to her,
visualization, the extrovert of the senses plays strongly in my imagination,

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but as a kinetic daydreamer always moving, so do rhythms and sound.
I try to balance the dreamer in me by grounding in yoga, nature, or physi-
cal work. Body awareness informs my writing and guides me towards truth.
As a farmer and herbalist trained in the wise woman tradition, I try to
embrace the earthy chaos of life, unexpected yet cyclical. As a poet, I try to
pay homage to demons as well as to gods and goddesses, as Sri Lankan and
Balinese dancers taught me to do. Like my teachers, I believe demons hang
out at the crossroads, the evident place for a poet to be.

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Laura E. J. Moran
I am a performance poet who, over the past twenty years, has toured the
USA, Ireland, Canada and Mexico. I am the author of several collections
of poetry: Improper Joy (Stockport Flats, 2006) and Live Bait (CD, Great
Divide, 2005), and three one-woman poetry shows entitled Inhibition
Exhibition (2006), Improper Joy Live (2008), and Eden: The Dark Side of Paradise
(2010). With internationally renowned NACL Theatre, I have created
productions Hatchings (2009), Stray Dog (work in progress) and a new
project, Jump the Snake, a staged version of my hybrid poetry novel (2012).
An interview by Jeffrey McDaniel with me can be found on the Poetry
Foundation’s “Harriet the Blog” (April 2011). New York State Council
on the Arts, The Center for Book Arts in NYC, and Poets and Writers have
supported my work. I was the 2011 Beverly Hiscox Scholar at Wilkes
University Creative Writing Graduate Program where I earned an M.F.A.
I am also the curator of the First Fridays Contemporary Author’s Series
now in its seventh year. In 2011, I created “Unearthed: Oral History of the
Upper Delaware River Region,” a program which formalizes an on-going
relationship with the people, places, and stories belonging to my valley
community.
Resonances mystify language. History ghosts what we say and how we say
it. The past bridles then leads intent, brings us framed into pastures, too,
where only color and line are solid enough to inform. Color and line are
a language past language. At seven, my daughter sat at the foot of Picasso’s
Blue Horse and Boy, eyes transfixed, steady, but her drawing hand flittered

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about the page shaping a child’s rendition, configuring only her essential.
But more, her depiction stops abruptly. What story don’t we see, don’t we
hear? The girl artist told by a uniformed man to get up and move on. What
would have presented itself, how do her unfinished lines finish the story.
The painted Boy’s hand raises as if handling an imaginary leather lead;
the horse—believing, too—it is tethered confronts us. We fill in the blanks.
How? Patterns. Experience tells us the arm moves in a certain angle, the
hand fits this way, the taut neck, this, and closely tied footsteps do fall
in rhythm. We expect. Experience resonates. It ripples out of the body—
in heartbeat, in breath, in speech, in footstep, in fingerprint, in elbow
angle, in brushstroke—and behaves accordingly. We predict the future or
compile the past based on trial and error and a little inspiration, the wild
godly breath, the first vowel. Resonance, predictably, requires source.
What was the first sound? No fact exists that ancient, no hard tether to
the past. So scientists tune in to the earth’s secret built-in hum, frequency
about 7.83Hz, too low for busy commuters to stop transfixed to hear. But
in that mythic rumble, that ripple, that cycle, rests origin, wordless and
unfinished.

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creation

creation

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