November 2014, Issue #1
Seeing in the Dark
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editorial
I. Living By Dream
Miriam Greenspan
Dreamkeeper
Seeing in the Dark
Deena Metzger
Living By Dream
Susan Bradley
Dream Dogs 1 and 2
Patricia Reis
Over the Edge
Cynthia Travis
Accounts
Maia
Naming
Sara Wright
Angels: After the Maine Bear Referendum
Marilyn DuHamel
Call and Response with An Irish Brogue
Susan Cerulean
Holding Sacred Posture
Kristin Flyntz
Grieving with the Elephants
II. Towards a Resurrected
Knowing
Sonja Swift
Good Morning, (End of the) World: Notes toward a Resurrected Knowing
Jan Clausen
Veiled Spill #11, #12, #13
Cynthia Travis
The Original World
Maia
Letter from Demeter
Susan Bradley
Honeycombed
Hexagons with Packets
Kate Miller
Bearing the News: Wolf Hunt Revived in Minnesota
Sharon Rodgers Simone
A Parliament of Ravens
Marilyn DuHamel
Broken Open
Margo Berdeshevsky
Door
In the Falling of Late Fire Days
And Our Hands
L’Amour n’est pas mort
Sara Wright
My Yellow Spotted Lady
Regina O’Melveny
Corydalidae cornutus
Dyana Basist
What the Aspen Revealed
Harriet Ellenberger
Desire Spoken under a Night Sky
Moe Clark
nitâhkôtan
Regina O’Melveny
Corydalidae cornutus
Otherwise known as the Dobsonfly,
flew to our failing lantern before
the hunchback moon could divert him.
His crisp cellophane wings crossed
as he staggered up and down the table
snookered by sputtering light.
A formidable drunk, three inches long
with segmented antennae and wangly
mandibles half the length of his body.
Predaceous, but not upon us,
the ancient creature clamped other
insects that bumbled into the lantern
while we sipped wine and plucked apart
the fried trout hooked that day when
they blundered up for the Dobsonfly lures.
One must always regard the god
in disguise as a guest at one’s table.
So we let him stay though skanky.
Later I read that he is the most
primitive of all insects
that lumbers through metamorphosis.
Even the small gods shift around enacting
their monstrous, wondrous urges.
And even now they bless our days.
Thanks be to hunger then, to summer’s end,
fish, and insects, to all the clumsy appetites
we can’t untangle from prayer.
Notes:
I have worked for a while, in my poems, toward witness of some of the very smallest and even rejected or loathed creatures on earth, that is, insects, because since childhood I've felt awe and wonder for them. James Hillman once suggested that the things we despise the most in insects are the very things we cannot bear in ourselves - rapacity, proliferation, monstrosity. This projection has caused some of the greatest environmental damage in recent history through the use of pesticides that are largely responsible for bee colony collapse, as well as being responsible for great harm to all other creatures, including ourselves.
I believe that in attending to the small, we benefit the larger fabric of life. This poem is from a book-in-progress, Small Gods. It was previously published in a slightly different form by Connotation Press: An Online Artifact.
Regina O’Melveny is a writer, teacher and assemblage artist whose award-winning poetry and prose have been anthologized and widely published in literary magazines such as The Bellingham Review, rattapallax, The Sun, The LA Weekly, Solo, The Wild Duck Review, and Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. Her long poem Fireflies won the Conflux Press Poetry Award and was published as an artist's book designed by Tania Baban. Blue Wolves, a collection of poems with reproductions of her assemblages, won the Bright Hill Press poetry book award. Her novel The Book of Madness and Cures, was published by Little, Brown and Company, and was listed under “Time Passages: The Year’s Best Historical Fiction” for 2012 at npr.org. She has taught writing at Marymount College, the Palos Verdes Art Center and South Coast Botanic Gardens, and lives with her husband in Rancho Palos Verdes.
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