winter 2008

Two Poems   Rebecca Givens
Fall Cleaning   Nils Peterson
Two Poems   Doug Ramspeck
The Whale   Matt W. Miller
The Elegant Universe   Jeremy Voigt
The Theory of Vanished Destinies   Kimberly Abruzzo
Dream Aubade   Jill McDonough
The Breakup   Jordan Sanderson
The Joy of Sex   Carrie Conners
Sisters   Roger Pfingston

Featured Poet   Shanna Compton

Visuals by 
Nick Patten

from the ether

“One must have a mind of winter . . .”
                                    —Wallace Stevens

On Winter

By this point in the season, I find myself tiring of the winterish beast I become who craves extra calories, piles of polartec, and a good blaze in the fireplace even here where I sit in relatively mild Northern California (rain-rain-rain). 

“And have been cold a long time

Our far-flung editorial team find themselves in various stages of flu and colds and work-induced overload. The new year’s determinations to organize this office, this desk, these piles, the writing, update systems, submit to contests and journals and write new stuff and revise and take time to think and read run at last aground in fresh piles.

“To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

That’s what we’re supposed to do in the winter, right, hunker down in some form of hibernation, to know quiet and reflect in a fallow season of introspection and restoration. To be as still as a winter landscape.

“For the listener, who listens in the snow,

February telescopes toward spring, even with Leap Year’s extra day. The season inclines to the next, whether in green daffodil spears, buds swelling along wet limbs, or packages of pink marshmallow Peeps stacked in the aisles at Longs Drugstore where I buy another bottle of Robitussin. 

“And, nothing himself, beholds

Time is weird and all we have, and what we can’t have. 

“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

It is with such a mind of winter that we offer the Winter 2008 issue of the DMQ Review, buoyed by the work of our contributors, the generous images of featured artist Nick Patten, and our continued collaboration with Peter Davis’ Poet’s Bookshelf in the work of featured poet Shanna Compton. We are ever appreciative of our contributors and you our readers who move with us, season to season.

Please find the full text of the Wallace Stevens poem I’ve been so liberally referencing, below.

From the ether,

Sally Ashton, Editor in Chief


Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; 

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice, 
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind, 
In the sound of a few leaves, 

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow, 
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.