Artwork © Ira Joel Haber

 

Look

Look, I
said, before you
go to sleep

a flat place
under the churning
ceiling

news seeping in
with the wind
that awful dust strangling

my nostrils, every
crack broke open
look —those secrets

in broad daylight
open to the public, redacted
the wrong names, then

what about digging
holes of emptiness to
find the dead bodies

it keeps me up at night
again, the
flatness is only a board

tossed into a churning
ocean of sand
yelling at me

at us, no sleep
hogging the covers
stealing from us

 

Jules Nyquist, Ph.D., is the founder of Jules’ Poetry Playhouse in Placitas, NM. Her recent award-winning books are Atomic Paradise, Homesick, then, and The Sestina Playbook (Poetry Playhouse Publications). She took her PhD in Post-Secondary Adult Education from Capella University and her MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. Jules poems have been featured in print, online, audio, radio or in-person at various readings and events including the NM History Conference, in Las Cruces, NM, the American Psychological Association Conference in Denver, CO, the Jonquil Motel in Bisbee, AZ, the Rattlesnake Museum in Albuquerque, NM, a kind of a small array gallery in Magdalena, NM, the Briar in Minneapolis, MN, the Black Dog Café in St. Paul, MN, a Masonic Lodge in Bemidji, MN, the New Mexico Humanities Council, in Albuquerque, NM, Unquarked in Los Alamos, NM, and featured at the International Women’s Day at the Santa Fe Capitol Rotunda, and many other bookstores, bars, galleries, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in Salamander, 5AM, Malpais Review, Adobe Walls, A View from the Loft, St. Paul Almanac, Long Islander News, Gray Sparrow, House Organ, Duke City Fix, Café Review IKON Magazine, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, and elsewhere.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine 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,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.