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Contemporary Verse 2
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Poetry Only

Spring 2010. Vol. 32 No.4

With this installment of “Poetry Only”, CV2 is very pleased to present new work by a couple of CV2’s most illustrious alumni: Sylvia Legris, Tim Bowling, and Mary di Michele, as well as work from an amazing array of perhaps less familiar but very awesome poets, including Darren Bifford, Marita Dachsel and Elisabeth de Mariaffi.

Online content from this issue

  • Cervical Vertebra Variation

    by Sylvia Legris
    Syringes crescendo incrementally. Segmental sound drift. Rostrum-gist shifts from leading edge to trailing. Feathers shed antithetically (molto molting melodeon).  ...

  • Cervical Vertebra Variation (2)

    by Sylvia Legris
    C2. Axis. Song cycle symphysis. The second cervical vertebra a pivot on which the air changes direction. Rotating wave  ...

  • Cervical Vertebra Variation (3)

    by Sylvia Legris
    Backward-fold  the  cervical  atlas.  The  spinal incunabulum articulates the isochronal loral line. Hollow bone archaeology. Canarygrass reed, elemental cannulae, transitional...

  • Plague of Interpreters

    by Doug Ramspeck
    Long after I have left this room, I am still somewhere. If not here, there. If not there, where?  ...

  • No Poem for Manitoulin Island

    by Elisabeth de Mariaffi
    You envy nothing. Not the firm riot of trees casting closer as boat pulls to shore. Not shore. Not road....

  • Umbrella by the Dumpster at Night

    by Elena E. Johnson
    O short-stringed kite of the underworld O flightless black moth   O crumpled cage of the rainless O question mark...

  • Drive

    by Jim Johnstone
    No one will find us in this city — not your valentine, not the line of dogs he’s chained by the throat....

  • London Plane

    by Rhona McAdam
    That plane tree caught my eye when I first walked here. A maple, the sellers said, wife streaming with allergies...

  • When I Was Good, Still

    by Mary di Michele
    It was a time when I was good to all the world, a time when all the world still called...

  • Damage Deposit

    by Jessica Michalofsky
    My Rumi, your Yeats. You back the threadbare furniture out the parlour door. I don’t help. In the kitchen, water...

  • Dinner Theatre

    by Myna Wallin
    1.   I played Chopin on our grand piano, languid legato, my mother suffering from radiation poisoning that burned both...

  • Writing, after heavy spring rain

    by Veryan Haysom
    These are markers on the dial of the seasons: Armloads of winter wood & hours beside the kumquat coals of...

  • Station

    by Toni Van Deusen
    When the piano arrived, suddenly what had been simply our front room became the parlour. The old Hamilton gave my...

  • Painting in the Tropics, 2009

    by Amy L. White
    No fish, this time, no fish. Find a fresh canvas and rack it up. Then paint, you old fool, paint....

  • Proof of an Afterlife

    by Rebecca Ellis
    In the graveyard at Ottawa, Illinois, Geiger-counters detect the afterlife. Here and all across town in landfills the white dust...