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Spring 2005 Issue

Bauble

A Beautiful Bauble Beckons
If you reach, it may roll away.
If you take it up, it may burst against your breast.

The bauble is but an illusion.
Causing confusion?
Bringing clarity?
Meeting your reflexion?
Coming to rest in your breast,
and rolling away, leaving its impression.

Autumn/Winter 2005 Issue

Summer 2004 Issue

Winter 2004 Issue

Summer 2003 Issue

Editor's Note

Etching

Young fair blond man.
Skin color of rose and bronze.
How can I take his laughing
image etched against the blue
enjoying so teasing me?
How to imprint the curve of the smile
pulling the lovely lashed eyelids upward and round
to express his impishness in such a beautious shape?
A Che Guevara print of youthful joy.
How to sear it in the brain against the sky?

Guidelines

SNR's Writers

Mail

Body Snatcher's Snapshot

As I said, it was so fun talking to you,
gazing up at your smiling, laughing,
unforgettably upturned eyes.
But as much as I might have wanted
to take you soul, if offered for a moment,
I could not.
Unless you were all open to me like a shutter.
Unless you were all open to me like a shutter,
I only took a snapshot of my own soul.

Swan Song

Through the café glass
Sideview of the young man
Profile in ashes.
Shapely chest. Tiny hips.
Chest ajar
with pneumonic fluids, antibiotics
and tar.
Breathing it in. He sucks.
His swan's neck extended
in an exaggerated gesture
of this deadly stick dance
exhaling the witches' burning brew.
No Grace in this ballet.
Swan's longing. Swan's lungs.
Prey to respiratory infection.
Pray for Inspiration
to put the Spirit back in.

Through the Window Screen
It/She/He?

Heard a little clicking
Walked into the room
Window by the doorway.
Saw the squirrel
Nut in its muzzle.
Said, "Hello, Sweetheart."
Had never been so close
to this wild creature
just across the screen next to the sill.
She listened…alert.
Twitching back and forth
Not too skittish.
But then he stepped away
to the end of the ledge
And Beyond.

**********

Perhaps you are still listening,
but it is I who must step away,
Skittish.
Twitching.
If it is I the untame creature,
I'll be in the park.
Out on a limb.



Rita Faulkner is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois in French, Arabic, and English postcolonial literatures. She will defend her dissertation on national allegory, land, and body in the works of the Arab women writers Nawal El Saadawi of Egypt and Assia Djebar of Algeria in May 2005. Her interests, however, include other “non-Western” literatures and religions such as Japanese literature and Buddhism. The first poem, “Beautiful Bauble” was written on a bike ride in the summer of 2004. The following poems came as the result of interactions with animals and humans. In addition to having been published previously in SNReview, she has published “Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Women, Veils, and Land” in World Literature Today and “Ce Sexe qui est deux, ce sexe qui est Dieu” in Dalhousie French Studies.



Copyright 2005, Rita Faulkner. This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.