I’ve just received my contributor’s copy of SEEMS #42, a literary magazine published out of Lakeland College in Wisconsin. Lovely! I’m really smitten with a poem by Carol Williams-Noren, entitled “Mistakes.”  Here the narrator describes an online chat with a man she loved in college:

“He says I’m sorry, and I type the words
on the screen but let the cursor blink
and blink before I give him it’s ok.”

— what a perfect description. This issue of SEEMS also includes a poem from my unpublished manuscript, Work from the Permanent Collection:

The Lovers, Bound
– after René Magritte’s “Les Amants I.” (1928)

Plaster walls meet in a blank embrace
and we kiss as the walls kiss – captured, solidly.
The blind flesh of a hood becomes your face.

Four lips squirm beneath this wet burlap taste,
your bare arm dangles. We don’t quite see
the plaster walls meet in a blank embrace;

We can’t yet see each other. Hooded. No sense of place.
Your sleeveless dress loves my suit instinctively;
the blind fabric of the hood becomes your face.

We kiss like hooded peregrine, denied a taste
of what we hold, a thing squirming to be free
where plaster walls meet in blank embrace;

We kiss while our features are erased!
You whisper loss — I murmur lonely,
the bound flesh of a hood becomes your face.

Outside, your train arrives with rusty grace
and sleeping cars shudder, clasped tightly.
Plaster merges, verged; we steal one more embrace.
The blank page of the hood becomes your face.

Les Amants, a painting by Rene Magritte. Originally uploaded by Elle Enne