Two Poems by M. J. Iuppa

Millennium to Millennium

How many weeks are in a day
and how many years in a month?~ Neruda

Not of this world, mountains rise
obliquely in a winter sky, casting
shadows on sour fields that refuse
to tell me what is wrong.

I am moving— a slow flight
through language I’ve lost
to perfection.

Boxed between panes, dead bees
curled in transparent parentheses.
Soundlessly they take me
by surprise.

I am returning— a dream
coming back in springtime. I will
pick my blade from moist earth

& raise it up to the sun
& wind, and brandish it before
an affluent crowd who seem
to forget where life starts

& ends. I will face their mal-
function, without wanting
to punish them.

And so on

Clapboard houses scattered on this hushed countryside were
raised within the short distance of the road rising and falling
into the Alleghenies. There isn’t a name for this road but people
say it’s God’s country. The leaves are turning shades of umber or
is it ochre? No, it’s the color of faraway, even though some refer
to it as being just down the road. It’s the place where you end up
stopping and looking around, which is the mistake most of us make.
You can hear a soothing waterfalls and there is an abandoned paint-
blistered church with worn gray steps, inviting you to cross the gate
into paradise. Someone is expecting you . . .

M. J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Her most recent poems have appeared in Poetry East, The Chariton Review, Tar River Poetry, Blueline, The Prose Poem Project, and The Centrifugal Eye, among other publications. Her most recent poetry chapbook is As the Crow Flies (Foothills Publishing, 2008), and her second full-length collection is Within Reach (Cherry Grove Collections, 2010). Between Worlds, a prose chapbook, was published by Foothills Publishing in May 2013. She is Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor program at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, 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 & 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.