Done with mirrored boxes or silk scarves,
so when I leave, for him, I cease to exist.
Later, he'll wave a want or a wand, conjure me,

and--until the world clamors--
I'll be his dark matter, his sleight-of-hand,

as he reaches out, plucks me again,
says I am his love,
his center, his sudden pearl from the sea

when in truth, I am no more than
his pupil, sometime favorite, occasional trick.

He Said, She Said

The maze of the unexpected: he said, she said,
who picked up the child from the middle
of the street. In the realm of unlikely events,
what is more unlikely than losing the narrative,
no words to stitch a catastrophe together?
No King's horses or King's men to lament
arrested time and splintered eggshells.
The equations remain too fast, vision skewed,
trajectories misapplied. The child has turned to
white marble. Nothing is linear. Rain has begun
to fall. Periodic orbits, part of a crazed cycle
of time, are weaker now, distorted
by the unexpected drops. No clews, no physicists,
no steady state, no consoling brakes.

Susan Terris' new book, Fire is Favorable to the Dreamer, will be published in 2003 by Arctos Press. In 2004, Adastra Press will publish a letterpress edition of her chapbook Poetic License and Marsh Hawk Press will publish her book The Art of Protection. Other recent books of poetry are: Curved Space (La Jolla Poets Press, 1998), Eye of the Holocaust (Arctos Press, 1999) and Angels of Bataan (Pudding House Publications, 1999). Her recent fiction is Nell's Quilt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Journal publications include The Antioch Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and Southern California Anthology.

In the last three years Ms. Terris has had 11 different poems nominated for Pushcart Awards.

On-line, she has had work (partial listing) in Recursive Angel, Web Del Sol, Perihelion, Poetry Daily, New Works Review, Blue Moon Review, Switched-on Gutenberg, PoetryMagazine.com, PoetryBay, On the Page, Zero City, Wise Women's Web, & Zuzu's Petals.

Ms. Terris is editor with CB Follett of RUNES, A Review Of Poetry. See her website:http://members.aol.com/sdt11  

  Susan

  Terris