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Steve Myers
Prologue:
Blood-born from the womb, vision-fuzzed, we aspire
to radiance as all things seeded aspire to radiance.*
Memory, e.g.
. Thirty years this sweetgum, widescreen
in our front window, hallowing the lawn, limbs
fissioning with orange and yellow pentagrams
through 5 a.m. November’s semi-gloom.
. What name’s
lovelier than liquidamber, sweetgum’s sexier moniker?
Thirty years! Window, sweetgum, South Mountain
background, moon-shine, these lines.
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*The opening couplet in “Prologue” is a riff on lines by Charles Wright.
About the writer:
Steve Myers has published a full-length collection, Memory’s Dog, and two chapbooks. A Pushcart Prize winner, he has published sections of his Pennsylvania poem sequence in places such as Callaloo, Juxtaprose, Kestrel, Penn Review, Permafrost, The Southern Review, Stone Canoe, Tar River Poetry, and Valley Voices. He is a director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at DeSales University. Explore more of Steve Myers work in the new PDF pamphlet Once There Was a Way from Buttonhook Press.
Image: Woman in the Garden by Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874-1939). Oil on canvas. 81 x 65.4 cm. Circa 1912. Public domain.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprint Buttonhook Press, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation supporting writers and artists worldwide.
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