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
