MARKIE BABBOTT
MY HOROSCOPE AT THE OBGYN OFFICE
The diagram looks like a bull’s head
with fallopian tube horns,
sloping uterine head triangulating
into cervical nostrils.
Of course, I think of Taurus
and then this leads to my conflicts
about a good tenderloin,
and then I think of O’keefe and the desert skulls
and how she could find beauty
in this, how she would stare and stare,
sit and sit, until the shape arrived
in her hand, in her lap with
a palette of bone, orange and yellow
and a lone dead tree standing watch
over anything saccharine, anything morbid
the brilliance of eye socket
and the light within it,
a sky, with or without clouds.
Corina Willette, Floating figure, watercolor on paper
A QUESTION OF SUDDEN RISES
A question of sudden rises and more time than awfulness is so easy and shady. There is
precisely that noise.
--Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons
A question of sudden rises even when expected,
even when a beautiful life is in autumn and preparing its den,
padding and primping, eating walnuts and gooseberries.
A question of sudden rises and an awfulness too
that is why we chose a shaded place for sudden splashes,
crashes, screeches and sudden quiet too.
A sudden quiet question rises,
my lips shudder as I watch him push his walker
over the boardwalk to a cedar bench.
His lungs offer no more questions to the sky,
yet he pauses and looks up at the day-faint moon,
slouches even more and stillness is precisely that noise.
A precise question of death smells like swamp water,
sits on top of a lily pad stalked four feet into warm muck.
Shade begins the call and response:
insects and crow, porcupine and oak,
mudminnow and moccasin, red-winged and cattails.
The migratory thread the October sky.
A question of time is so easy as it rises with the dew,
taken by today’s westerly wind to the meadow grasses.
Breeze skims the surface off the awful question
to clear brown life cupped in his hands, now my hands,
and the water drips through our hands,
there is precisely that noise.
Markie Babbott's work has appeared in the Aurorean, CAIRN, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature By Women, Fifth Wednesday Journal, literary mama, Mannequin Envy, Perigee: Publication for the Arts, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Women.Period, (Spinsters Ink, 2008), The Women¹s Times: Pioneer Valley and Tupelo Press Poetry Project (12/09). Her chapbook, Sus Scrofa, won the 2008 Poets Corner Press Chapbook contest. Markie has also chased down the moon in canoe, caught it, stuffed it in her pocket and replaced the original with an imposter. I'm onto you, Markie.
Corina Willette has been drawing from the moment she could hold a crayon. At the age of ten, Corina wanted to be a Fashion Designer, Writer and the President of the United States. Although these goals have changed since then, she remains fascinated with design, art, story and the politics of being human. Corina received her BFA in painting from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2010 and though she works primarily in oils, watercolors and mixed media, she regards all medium as potential drawing tools. Her background in art includes an apprenticeship with her mother and fiber artist, Deidre Scherer. Corina is currently nestled between the White Mountains and the Lakes region in New Hampshire with her husband and children.