SUMMER 2010

Standing Alone on Santa Monica Pier in Love with Smallness   Brian Diamond
Perigee   Jason Tandon
Two Poems   Mark Liebenow
Denial   M. Nasorri Pavone
Two Poems  Brian McGackin
He Calls Her Etsy   Karen Schubert
Dear Gaybashers   Jill McDonough
Making  T. Savoie
Ghazal of the Sharp Knife  Sarah J. Sloat
Why I Stopped Going to the Chiropractor   J.R. Solonche
Isla Mujeres   Angela Narciso Torres
Knowledge   Laura McCullough
And Let God   R.A. Riekki
The Day the Beekeeper Died: Sulaymaniyah                  David Sullivan

Featured Poet   E. Ethelbert Miller

Visuals by 
Carol Bennet

from the ether

On Dappled Things

This month my mind has been filled with dappled things: Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty”, the first yellow leaves poking out among the green as September approaches, the intensity of late with which I study the striped and mottled fur of my elderly black and grey tabby cat.... So it seemed a sweet synchronicity when I visited the Web site of this issue’s DMQ visual artist, Carol Bennett, whose paintings so marvelously capture the ways light and shadow interact with water, the resulting dream-like reflections, the beautiful distortions of color and shape.

The poems in this issue offer their own versions of Hopkins’ “fickle, freckled,” of “things counter, original, spare, strange”—the sea figuring prominently in several. I particularly admired the curious range of images in the poems, from the stars in the universe—“some large enough to blot out entire histories”—to hundred-foot trees to a boiled-wool woman who lives in a terrarium. We hope you, too, find much to admire and enjoy in this issue.

Along with our featured artist, poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller makes an appearance as our featured poet as part of our on-going collaboration with editor Peter Davis’ two remarkable anthologies, Poet’s Bookshelf, 1 and 2. Here you’ll find some of Miller’s new poems as well as his essay regarding essential books.
Enjoy!
 

Marjorie Manwaring
Editor