yea, a heart is a lively creature, filled
with quiet musings,
subtle thrummings,
murmurous hummings.

aye, she is rapturous and verdant,
swindling common sense
with fictive branches
white with blossoms.

yet, she is the taproot of things,
descending through
the earth warm
with worms, and moist.

nay, she does not die.

(Click image twice to enlarge)

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Elizabeth Pinborough graduated from Yale Divinity School with a Master of Arts degree in religion and literature. She desires to resurrect women’s voices from the past, and through her writing she seeks to create a space for feminist historical and theological exploration. Her poetic journeys include “A Shaker Sister’s Hymnal,” which first appeared in Dialogue and which now appears in Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets. Most recently she collected a series of essays and photographs titled Habits of Being: Mormon Women’s Material Culture, which is being published by Exponent II in spring 2012. Her credo is, “Snails are people, too.”

Cayuga Lake’s asleep again,
ice-locked at her edges.
Dressed once more
in shreds of white,
organza, wispy curls
across her skin-
beauty lying deeper
than her dreams.

Denise and I would skate
when we were girls,
flying toward each other
till we met and locking hands
would spin in dizzy circles,
laughter pealing bright
in frigid air;

innocent of life to come
and choices made,
of sorrow bearing arms
against the days
that rush ahead
with thawed intent-
the seasons spinning too.

Will you hold me
in your arms
as winter turns,
as icy stages thin
then melt away?

Singing to the Sacred,
the mocking bird
as Easter comes-
in the flowering pear
whose leaves are just now
loosening on the bough.

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Lou Davies James grew up on the beaches of Eastern Long Island and currently lives in North East Florida with her husband Wes and far too many cats. She is the author of one full length volume of poetry, Adrift in the Holy, and two chapbooks; Drawn as Ever and Internal Insomnia. She has most recently been published in Victorian Violet Press.

When the little girls on the playground
threatened the boys with a kissing,
and they, slick with danger, ran
like wry hares, he made short work of it,
got ready his cheeks, mistook a step.

Now such generosity is lost on them,
his awkwardness thought sabotage,
and untimely glances which have
followed him since loving boyhood
turned like Actaeon’s hounds.

It has been harder game for all
since the older, changed child gave out,
golden, the new rule: each should turn,
by moments, hare, hound, hare.
It’s a bad curse with two cries.

He gives tongue to rough myth or shrieks
in briars as dreamed dogs bear down.

Still may the old knowing that grows
men’s hearts fix him on a bone,
his shape no more dissolve mid-step.
Old form shakes him like this, by the blood.
He comes from folk who once wived as wolves.