Creation

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: Lori Anderson Moseman 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

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

4 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

5 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

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

Creation

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

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11 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

12 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. Lori Anderson Moseman

13 —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

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

15 ...of the Earth

16 Of the Earth Color viscosity etching, 20” x 16”, 1991 Edition of 100

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19 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

20 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

21 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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23 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? Lori Anderson Moseman

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25 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

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

...of the Sun

28 Of the Sun Color viscosity etching, 20” x 16”, 1991 Edition of 100

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31 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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33 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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35 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. Lori Anderson Moseman

36 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

37 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

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

...of the Moon

40 Of the Moon Color viscosity etching, 20” x 16”, 1991 Edition of 100

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43 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

44 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

45 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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47 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. Lori Anderson Moseman

48 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

49 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

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

...of the Stars

52 Of the Stars Color viscosity etching, 20” x 16”, 1991 Edition of 100

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55 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

56 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

57 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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59 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. Lori Anderson Moseman

60 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

61 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

62 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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67 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

68 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.

69 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

70 “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.

71 Lori Anderson Moseman 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

72 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?

73 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

74 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.

75 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,

76 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.

77 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

78 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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