Box Book
The BoxBook is a coptic stitch hand bound book of boxes, each of which opens to a poem. The Hole in the Head Review published photographs of the BoxBook along with three additional poems. You can read them here.
Risk!
Published here in Atticus Review.
Risk! I threw away your game today miniature plastic militaries in the same lidded boxes — infantry, cavalry, cannon. The tiny wood blocks you played with well into adulthood — painted yellow, blue, pink, green, black, red — now scattered in the trash. I’m anxious. Today began with cows loose in the road. Then I voted. Fog hovers over snow patches in the pasture. Pink is now gray. I discard the plastic, dig out the blocks, hold the heartwood and remember how you handled your bright armies.
Blizzard Book
A blizzard book is made from a series of folds, creating a binding with no stitching or fasteners. Each set of facing pages has a pocket. In my Blizzard Book there are four sets of pages, in each set a poem and corresponding collage. The Blizzard Book is published here in Hole In The Head Review. The collages and poems are also below.
Losing Track
I lose track of my shadow
the night I lose track of the moon.
She’s always been clear I don’t own her
even when I pin her to the earth.
I don’t need to be followed, can live
with emptiness behind, and above
the bloated face is gone — hooded
eyes, a dash of nose, smudged mouth.
I wait for the estate of dawn —
as slivers slip in thin air I hold
out my hands to collect the silver
then scatter the captured glint.
Licking Her Paws She hurls curses and begins with men, flexes her paws to spread the claws wide and rake faces into furrows, hopes blood will help the healing. She calls a convocation of crones to wield ladles in cauldrons of broth conjured to know from the inside who to nourish, who to poison. Saplings sprout where bodies fall, rise and ripen into trees, open leafed and bearing seed pods that spill secrets that no longer need keeping. She licks her paws, claws retracted, fur soft on her tongue.
My Work I was taught to read left to right, to follow the arrow always pointing in one direction. Yet birds cross continents to breed then fly back with the sun following berries and insects. I’m ready for reversal, to surrender the colonies in my brain, let new colors blossom along the default network. I call on the cross and staff to bend and curl, empty my pockets and accept the feather crow left me.
Song for America This land is not yours and not mine and not made but silenced so where is hope buried? The mountains of my horizon frost white on cold mornings, melt back to ash as the day warms. In summer my neighbor leaves milk at my door capped with silk from meadow grasses unrolled across hummocks of granite whose steep edges poke small cliffs in wooded hillsides carpeted in leaf litter and hardy moss undaunted by thirst. Spring unfurls its ribbons, diamonds and skyways shine as fog lifts a voice chants notes once lost to forests and fields, the story that rises in us as we sing.
Grace Mattern 