Heather Thomas is Featured Poet for First Thursday Poetry Reading August 3rd

 

August's Featured Poet is Heather Thomas

Heather H. Thomas is the author of Vortex Street (FutureCycle Press), Blue Ruby (FootHills Publishing), Resurrection Papers (Chax Press), and Practicing Amnesia (Singing Horse Press), twice a National Poetry Series finalist. She has poems forthcoming in Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts and the Keystone Poets Anthology. Among the journals publishing her work are About Place, Barrow Street, Interim, Pedestal Magazine, Persimmon Tree, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and anthologies including Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest. Her poems are translated and published in Albanian, Arabic, Italian, Lithuanian, Spanish, and Swedish. For many years Heather co-edited the literary journal 6ix with five Philadelphia poets, and she recently edited an international portfolio for Persimmon Tree. She lives along the Schuylkill River with her cat, Lily Briscoe. 

DOUBLE HELIX

As if heart and lungs flatten back to ribs

           a clearing inside the body. As if there is

no use in a center, you can live

           hollowed out, away from one taking the place

of a mountain, you whose bluff body

          has the power to part water,

to spin parallel wakes, to stand in the way

         of wind’s blunt edge, diagonal to the flow.

As if standing at the crossroad

         buttoning your coat, wind-whipped,

the coat scissoring into tatters and you

         spiraling into cloudscript,

a double helix across the sky, the future plunging

          to the past, where friction and pressure

shed a signature

         here, now, on the body vibrating.

Heather H. Thomas, from Vortex Street (FutureCycle Press)

First published in Barrow Street