Poem by Frances Donovan

For Beth with the Golden Hair

I am a weaker version of you
you are a stronger version of me
you said as you did not grind the gears
as you pushed it into fifth
moving the stick with the smooth motions
of unconsciousness

From the sooty depths of our tiny city
from the wedge of my apartment
you shifted and curved us into
the otherside, the neverwas, the green corridors
where I did not live

Into the empty cavern of your house
the gleaming counters
the papered walls
you took me, you brought
me there with the unconscious nonchalance
of one born to green corridors

I loved you with the blue love
of the unaware. Not till years later,
shifting and curving and unconscious
in a car of my own buying
did it occur to me I might have loved you
with something more

Frances Donovan holds a degree in English from Vassar College and is a member of the Workshop for Publishing Poets in Boston. Her work has appeared in Lyrical Somerville, PIF Magazine, The Writer, Chronogram, Perimeter, Gender Focus, and The dVerse Anthology: Voices of Contemporary World Poetry. She curated the Poetry@Prose reading series in Arlington, MA and has appeared as a featured reader at a number of venues in the New England and upstate New York.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Since 2007 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 160 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. He currently teaches art to retired public school teachers at The United Federation of Teachers program in Brooklyn.