�Four Poems by Corrine De Winter
A Stranger�s Arms
In any dream of confession
I enter the chapel barefoot
Having come straight
From a stranger's arms
On the crooked side of town
Where a song came to us in fragments
From a safe room.
"...down to Georgia
Gonna weep no more."
It's okay
That I have lost my shoes
And wear only a crepe dress
Although it's 10 days
Before Christmas.
I am warm with wine
And crossing myself
With tepid holy water.
When I speak
To the smoke screen
Of the priest's face
I tell him
How the stars
Drag me down with wishing,
How I am reluctant to be
Only one song
In the whole universe.
������ Book of the Dead
"You're not dead until there isn't a flash of you
in memory left anywhere." -S.J. Marks
Tonight I allow the dead
To live inside me,
To assemble their bleach white bones,
Their string of Told-You-So's.
I have kept within me their off time alphabet.
The dead move me,
As anything beautiful and extinct,
Made perfect by absence.
There are so many,
Like crows
Fighting for space, for survival
In a world where everything
Is consumed.
After awhile their stories
Become as harlequin as fairy tales.
I follow them like religion,
Keeping alive
The old woman who slept under bridges,
The boy who could tame wild animals with his singing,
The girl who ate make believe.
������������
�������� �Rescue
Did you have to fall
In love
Deeper
Than where rests
The bones of travelers who never
Came back from winter
Voyages,
Where strings of pearls
And silver forks
And sea glass
Murmur together like
Old lovers?
Did you have to sink
As far as
The wishing well's
End where pennies and
Serpents and bloodworms
Commingle
In wicked changing symbols?
Did you have to fall
Over and over
Through the air
Like a scarlet leaf in November,
Divine and destined
To dissolve against ice,
To tumble and spiral
Downward
Like the stricken acrobat
Who realizes too late
That there is no
Greater risk
Than diving
For one's holy
Beloved?
��� Old World
Watching for hummingbirds
By the red salvia.
My thoughts
Are straddling the ghost of you.
In deep summer
The heat
And open windows,
The newborn kittens crying,
Dissolve the world.
Whatever happens now
This story
Will remain unfinished,
Raw as a dream
Culled from too many nights
Of solitude.
Corrine De Winter was nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, Corrine De Winter's poetry, fiction, essays and interviews have appeared worldwide in publications such as The New York Quarterly, Imago, Phoebe, Plainsongs, Yankee, Sacred Journey, Interim, The Chrysalis Reader, The Lucid Stone, Fate ,Press, Sulphur River Literary Review, Modern Poetry, The Lyric, Atom Mind, The Writer, The Lyric and over 800 other publications. She has been the recipient of awards from Triton College of Arts & Sciences, Writer's Digest, The Esme Bradberry Award, The Madeline Sadin Award, The Rhysling Award, and has been featured in Poet's Market 1995-2006. Her work is featured in the much praised collections Bless the Day, Heal Your Soul, Heal the World, Get Well Wishes, Essential Love, The Language of Prayer , Mothers And Daughters, and in Bedside Prayers, now in its 18th printing. She is the author of 9 collections of poetry & prose including Like Eve, The Half Moon Hotel, and Touching The Wound, which sold over 3000 copies in its first year, "The Women At The Funeral", winner of the 2004 Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement in poetry, and the latest published by Dark Regions Press "Tango In The 9th Circle." Ms. De Winter is a member of HWA (Horror Writer's Association) and resides in Western Massachusetts.
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