#100 DRAWING NEW MEXICO by Jane Shoenfeld

Everything is Glad to be Alive

Chama River,
flat as a lake,
opens up  the  bottom.
Green triangles of land,
on the right and left,
frame  the water.
Flesh orange cliffs,
rivers of sand,
flow to the right.
Dense junipers,
deep borders,
focus  attention.
A little sky, clouds
play at
opening  up the top.
Nothing
more important
than anything else.

—

Jane Shoenfeld is a painter and poet.  She lived in NYC from 1963 to 1987.  In ’87, she moved to NM.  Her paintings are the cover art for several recent poetry journals and she has written poetry for many years.

#99 Before the Prescribed Blunder by Janet Eigner

A tease of miracles, the raven rose just over my head
clasping a giant red jelly bean as it sailed above

the pine tree. I hiked the Santa Fe Southern rail
where it showed cleanly as any saint

its attribute, a vulture’s engorged beak.
Pinon-perched or swooping the currents

she’d likely tracked the bonbon
among this Eldorado Easter morning’s

hard-boiled chits of rebirth
blown-clean and faux.

Rising out from the sand, her wings sang wind
beak clasped around the burning egg.

The raven carried fire’s shine
its infinitely mirrored tunneling

a meaning I couldn’t ken
an unfolding

soon to be unleashed on Los Alamos
after the Lab’s prescribed burn.

—

Eigner’s  Cornstalk Mother, Pudding House, precedes the forthcoming, What Lasts is the Breath, Black Swan Editions. Also: Adobe Walls,Blue Mesa Review, Earthships, Echoes,Hawaii Review, Manzanita, Mudfish, Natural Bridge, NM Poetry Review,  Poets Against the War, Sagarin Review,  Daily Bleed, Poetry Foundation, SFLiterary Review, www.eignerdanceswithwords.com (poetry & dance).