Susan Grimm

How does the body signal its willingness. The return
of muscle swing, the wherewithal for almost bounce.

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Stretching the inside stuff
like a rusting cord. Full weight on that. Check the fascia

map. A message delivered not deduced, you grizzled
old twig, stretched wavery-flat like bad underwear.

Step back. Obeisance like downward facing dog. Then
when I breathed a tree of doing into my arms. Where

has it gone—resolve. Where is the steel box that I locked
intention in. Lost necklace of days that has slipped

its string. I clutch them up. I rattle them down like pistachio
shells on a plate. Their light sound. Their sound of no weight.

Susan Grimm

has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, and Field. She has written two chapbooks, Almost Home (1997) and Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue (2010), and a full-length collection, Lake Erie Blue (2004). She was the inaugural recipient of the Copper Nickel Poetry Prize (2010), won Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize (2011), and received two Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grants.

ART: Classification I by Kathy Bruce

Kathy Bruce is an environmental sculptor and collage artist whose work explores human forms within the context of poetry, literature and the natural environment. She received an M.F.A from Yale University School of Art and a certificate from The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Ms. Bruce is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Fulbright Hayes Senior Scholarship Grant for Lecturing and Research in Puno Peru 2012 and 1983, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship. She has exhibited her work in the US, and internationally including the UK, Senegal, Taiwan, France, Denmark, Peru and Canada.