A Solitary Moment in Time Pete Madzelan

you were beautiful then smiling while your fingers gripped the cool metal chains of the swing your white sneakers kicking gravity to propel down-and-up down-and-up now you only repeat the motion with breakfast-lunch-and-dinner

Mia you’re ugly now

down to the wrapping paper skin

so ugly I cannot open my eyes anymore to watch you walk out into that world

i cannot open them Mia in fear of waking up once more alive

to face your

beauty.

Amanda Schroth Mia

Barry Spacks My Scientist

Each poet was teamed with a scientist, mine the newly married Sadie Ryan Simonovich who works mainly in “human-wildlife disease interface with special concern for the way primates infect one another.” She speaks Elephant, Chimp, Cape Buffalo, not to mention Afrikaans and such. Mostly Sadie likes to count, to fill spreadsheets, to sample populations, invent software, oh scientists do like to count, while we slovenly poets need wild elixir for our work, want something whacky, unacountable to mix in there, something not quite sane (this in order to court, best we can, the mysterious). Along these lines, Einstein once wrote “the most beautiful and deepest experience” underlying the principle of religion, was “serious endeavor in art and science,” endeavor in “the mysterious,” so poets get to act whacky, grow even childlike, thus causing many of the scientists to smile or chide. For their part, the scientists natter on in a language drained at times so very dry and numerical that poets rush in with flagons of wine — Here, drink, drink, dance in the streets, dear Scientists. “Not now,” says Sadie the Scientist. “I must count, but perhaps later, after work, when you talk about me in a poem? as I dearly hope you will, you so smitten, so smug in your careless carefreeness.” The Poet pauses with a wry smile at this. He sighs: “Oh, my Scientist!”