“Personified Lightness” by Melissa Renaud; inspired by “Outer Reflection” by Lilibeth Rassmussen
“The Press of Light” by Paul Weigel; inspired by “Outer Reflection” by Lilibeth Rassmussen
“So, Glitzy Gals” by Erika Michael; inspired by “Outer Reflection” by Lilibeth Rassmussen
“Muse” by Feby Joseph; inspired by “Muse” by Jeremy Penn
“Façade for Siri” by Jennifer Greenberg; inspired by “Facade” by Elle Schorr
Inspired by: “Outer Reflection” by Lilibeth Rassmussen
PERSONIFIED LIGHTNESS by Melissa Renaud
Her skin is an ornamented network of mixed glass
I gaze
My hand becomes her hand
Her leg becomes my leg
And I imagine what it would be like to stroke my hand across her belly
My belly
To feel the sharp creases between her diamond facets
And disappear within her reflection
My body is perfection within her proportions
Like a fun house mirror
For a moment, it is me that’s the mannequin
But I move too quickly and disappear
Her skin becomes infinity again
Melissa “Monster” Renaud was born, and currently now lives, in the Detroit Metro area. She earned her bachelors of art in creative writing from Eastern Michigan University and is currently working as an event usherette with Retro Girls Detroit. Her work has been featured in Eastern Michigan’s student written one act festival, and numerous songwriter showcases. With art, her goal is to create magic, love, empowerment and understanding in everyday life. When not writing, she spends her free time playing the ukulele, making hand embroidered artwork and roller-skating with the Detroit Roller Derby.
Inspired by: “Outer Reflection” by Lilibeth Rassmussen
THE PRESS OF LIGHT BY Paul Weigl
We thought that after you swallowed it all—
the glass, the sand, the sun—
that everything inside you
would either tear apart or burn.
But it was the pressure of your voice
that closed in to save you.
Your heavy tongue dropped.
Your throat collapsed like an unstable mine
and trapped all the air
within the pink folds of your lungs.
When you finally spoke—
when the rock of your tongue rolled away—
the words came out in bright shards.
Everything was a sharp fragment
that needed to be made blunt.
I gathered them up
and bound them together like chainmail
so that they could be fixed against
each inch of stretched skin.
Everyone else can see
what is mirrored back at them,
but I can actually feel the radiance they gather.
I can touch the underside of all that swallowed sun
reflecting back against the lighted world.
Paul Wiegel lives and writes from his home near the Fox River in Berlin, WI. His poems have appeared in various journals both in print and online, including The English Journal, Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, and Whale Road Review. He has been writing and performing on-demand poems as a “street poet” on his 1957 Smith Corona manual typewriter for passersby at art galleries, farmers’ markets, and festivals for the past six years. He is a past winner of the John Gahagan Poetry Prize and the Lakefly Writers’ Conference poetry award. You can find him at www.foxriverpoetry.com
Inspired by: “Outer Reflection” by Lilibeth Rassmussen
SO, GLITZY GALS, by Erika Michael
what’s in it for you at the junction of gallery “come and go” trapping
fractured micro-flicks of tourist traffickers in loco slo-mo culture gone
Samaras — kinda’ like tomorrow’s non-show rad, that bad
blank hall without a mirror mirror on the wall for you svelte fellas
to remix those broken bits epoxied to your ass and — oh, I know, I know,
the rich outré, it’s pay to play! No way you’re just a dazzling expression
of some Willendorf or other mama-magic takeaway.
And therein lies the message — you’re so tame it hardly pays to stay the
game, glitzy chip mosaic pressing whimsy mirror-pics on mannikin fannies.
My mind agitates around the fragments filling this horror vacui —smell of
elephant in the room of my naggin’ noggin as I’m thinkin’ what’s with
all the busted spangle stuck on dummies?
Who’ll glue scraps of kids, grit flushed from gullets, bubbled skin
sluiced with pump spill slumped in mirrors of long lenses. What museum’s
gonna’ stockpile crates of cracked reflections from a thousand pupils.
Who’ll mend shards of icons collected in the endless retrospective of love.
Sulfer-suckin’ shooters scatter fire like a billion glowworms mirrored
on the floor in shadowy lobbies of pachyderms.
Erika Michael lives in the Seattle area. With a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Washington, she taught at Trinity University, Oregon State, and the University of Puget Sound. She has participated in a number of poetry workshops including those of the late Thomas Lux, Carolyn Forché, Linda Gregerson, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and Tim Siebles. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Cascade: Journal of the Washington Poets’ Association, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Mizmor l’David Anthology, Bracken Magazine, The Winter Anthology, The Princeton Institute For Advanced Study Letter, Belletrist Magazine, and elsewhere.
Inspired by: “Muse” by Jeremy Penn
MUSE by Feby Joseph
Take me then
And mold me as you deem
Wow them with your omniscience over stone and flesh –
Over me – how I entice
the stories that call to you out of your rocks.
Take me than
And write your epics
Cast me as your Eve – Madonna – Magdalene
Use my body to climb up
Those steep ladders to the footnotes in history.
Take me then
And compose your Symphonies
Use me to travel from heaven to hell
on an opium leitmotif
Write a thousand lieder in my image.
Leave a little bit
of what is left
of me
For me –
A few bits of flesh in dried acrylic.
For they will never know the one forever stripped off
Of Shadows –
Remolded and painted till
That facsimile of a forgotten original
Is finally forgotten.
Hailing from the beautiful South Indian coastal state of Kerala seeped in green and poetry, Feby Joseph is a spiritual vagabond still trying to figure it out. Presently Feby is working in a desert – counting other people’s money while words waltz about in my head. Some of Feby’s works have appeared on Café Dissensun, Oratoria, Wild Word and EntropyMag.
Inspired by: “Facade” by Elle Schorr
FAÇADE FOR SIRI by Jennifer Greenberg
In this time
there are only so many things we can let out of their cage:
technology – imitations of natural intelligence,
the great facade.
We make them in our image (and voice)
to wake us up on time,
schedule that appointment
(or help us feel less alone).
We Apple users call upon Siri – orchestrator
of the convenient, omnipotent assistant
to the unorganized animals: us.
We summon Siri
like a digital fortune teller
speaking to the stars,
colorless hands toiling in the invisible ether,
trading algorithms with satellites
in the privacy of our pockets,
never to leave, never to love
(if she were even capable of loving)
forever kept in a glass house
for her to give and
to give and
to give
all until we stop asking
for the answers to existence,
remembering the looking glass
and what Alice found there.
Jennifer Greenberg is a poet and fiction writer from South Florida working on her BA at Florida Atlantic University. Her works have been published in anthologies with The Creative Writer’s Alliance.
