LONNOL Events

WIZ’s heart and LONNOL Month is officially open.

We’ve received a few tokens of affection but are longing for more. Please search your files for poems, short fiction, short essays, mp3s of readings of your work or of other work that’s in public domain, your original artwork, etc. and send them winging our way.

Along with submissions from our readers, we’ll have a winter wonderland/fond feelings haiku chain, to be initiated soon.

Also, February 24th is WIZ’s birthday. We’ll be four years old. To celebrate, we’ll be offering one or more of WIZ’s old movie giveaways. Giving our readers presents on our birthday is something we really enjoy doing. To “win” an old movie, all you’ll have to do is read each movie’s review and comment in the comment section. WIZ will contact you with further instructions about how to receive your free DVD.

It has been a hard, difficult, overlong (some would say interminable) winter. Let’s use February to warm things up.

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God Filled the Earth with Tigers by Sarah Dunster

God filled the earth with tigers;
men and beasts warring for blood.
He painted them with warning
signs €”what scarlet spots! In God
we do not doubt. God filled the

earth with tigers.

The Father blessed his daughters
in the order of His good
Son, that we might all know good
and evil. And still we choose
sore fruit. God filled the earth with

tigers.

The spirit’s rushing waters
cannot stop Missouri silt
from covering the sins of
generations. What are we,
crouching here? God filled the earth

with tigers.

And you. Somehow there were no
stripes to warn. I fell, a thorn,
and you rid your hide of
pain. But, Love, certain death waits,
biding in the long, slow bleed–

God filled the earth with tigers.

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To read more of Sarah’s work on WIZ, go here, here, here, and here.

Image from a photo by J. Patrick Fischer via Wikimedia Commons Images.

hjerte by Elizabeth Pinborough

if a heart broke once forever would it
not be a dead thing?

yea, a heart is a lively creature, filled
with quiet musings,
subtle thrummings,
murmurous hummings.

aye, she is rapturous and verdant,
swindling common sense
with fictive branches
white with blossoms.

yet, she is the taproot of things,
descending through
the earth warm
with worms, and moist.

nay, she does not die.

(Click image twice to enlarge)

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Pinborough graduated from Yale Divinity School with a Master of Arts degree in religion and literature. She desires to resurrect women’s voices from the past, and through her writing she seeks to create a space for feminist historical and theological exploration. Her poetic journeys include “A Shaker Sister’s Hymnal,” which first appeared in Dialogue and which now appears in Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets. Most recently she collected a series of essays and photographs titled Habits of Being: Mormon Women’s Material Culture, which is being published by Exponent II in spring 2012. Her credo is, “Snails are people, too.”

Singing the Sacred by Lou Davies James

Cayuga Lake’s asleep again,
ice-locked at her edges.
Dressed once more
in shreds of white,
organza, wispy curls
across her skin-
beauty lying deeper
than her dreams.

Denise and I would skate
when we were girls,
flying toward each other
till we met and locking hands
would spin in dizzy circles,
laughter pealing bright
in frigid air;

innocent of life to come
and choices made,
of sorrow bearing arms
against the days
that rush ahead
with thawed intent-
the seasons spinning too.

Will you hold me
in your arms
as winter turns,
as icy stages thin
then melt away?

Singing to the Sacred,
the mocking bird
as Easter comes-
in the flowering pear
whose leaves are just now
loosening on the bough.

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Lou Davies James grew up on the beaches of Eastern Long Island and currently lives in North East Florida with her husband Wes and far too many cats. She is the author of one full length volume of poetry, Adrift in the Holy, and two chapbooks; Drawn as Ever and Internal Insomnia. She has most recently been published in Victorian Violet Press.