Author: Constance Brewer
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Origin Stories – Jessica Purdy
Ouroboros by Jessica Purdy Beginnings are snowscapes. Or skin never touched by the sun until birth. The end of a year is just as cheek-slapped as its opposite. In spring we wait. Like ice grits its teeth and succumbs to melting. New England summers that used to feel yearslong only relax the shoulders. Fleeting as…
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Origin Stories – Ann Wallace
Spring Song by Ann Wallace The sirens wail the soundtrack of this silent spring a keening intertwined with birdsong by day, with my daughter’s dry, dry cough through the night, life and death bound together contrapuntal on and on so that I no longer hear the sirens, until I do. “Spring Song,” originally published in…
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Origin Stories – Mary Makofske
Borders by Mary Makofske Drawn in ink or blood, they unspool from history to split mountains and valleys, meander in rivers that twist and turn, dragging their banks to new configurations, adding to, subtracting from, this dominion or that. Invisible, except when a fence or wall defines them, ramparts that open only through drawbridge or…
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Origin Stories – Patricia Ware
Creation Story by Patricia Ware After Rita Dove When she was born, the sun fled from despair and the earth gleamed. She was a fresh brush waiting for permission to paint the sky. When she was young, she sliced up sad till it bled. There were ghosts to flee from, daydreams for delight. She was…
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Origin Stories – Virginia Smith
Ukrainian Easter Eggs by Virginia Smith There in our snug living room, a TV tray her craft center, my seventies mom laughed at Carol Burnett, M*A*S*H*, All in the Family, her pop cult cover for pysanky witchery, gently pricking a hole with her needle at egg’s two tips, blowing never-to-be chicks into a bowl for…
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Origin Stories – Jeanne DeLarm
Swap Meet by Jeanne DeLarm A round kitchen clock, batteries corroded, displays the correct time, some time. This glass baking dish, we can use in our rental. Rubber dolls play inside a mini house dressed in swatches of dirty fabric. Cowboys, Native American plastic men intertwine. Vinyl rodeo corrals tangle with palm trees. Army guys…
