Mary Paulson

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2021

We Would Be Gods

Mary Paulson

Brahma sits cross-legged on a dream of the universe. Christ at the right hand of his Father.

Papatuanuku and Ranguini embrace in the only darkness, only Te Kore, the Nothingness from which they birth the world. I can’t stop

this wriggling inability to settle in my skin. My friend’s gone overboard, flapping her arms

as if they were wings, quickly sinking. My ex sees a star and jumps off the roof.

I’d like to sit like the Buddhist monks dangling their brown toes in the dark green current of the Tongle Sap river at dusk.

To sit on a star with my mother and watch the moon rise above and below us.

But we get bored easily. Invariably, I leave to watch TV. I can only see what’s in my head.

Someone is chasing ghosts like a dog chasing his tail. Someone is falling from the sky, wings on fire.

Mary Paulson lives in Naples, Florida. Her poems have appeared in various publications including Slow Trains, Main Street Rag, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nerve Cowboy, Thimble Lit Magazine and Arkana. Her chapbook, Paint the Window Open, is forthcoming from Alabaster Leaves Publishing, a Kelsay Books publication.

Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2021

Editor

Barry Harris is editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal and three anthologies by Brick Street Poetry: Mapping the Muse: A Bicentennial Look at Indiana Poetry; Words and Other Wild Things and Cowboys & Cocktails:Poems from the True Grit Saloon. He has published one poetry collection, Something At The Center.

Barry lives in Brownsburg, Indiana and is retired from Eli Lilly and Company. He is married and father of two grown sons.

His poetry has appeared in Kentucky Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, Silk Road Review, Saint Ann‘s Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Night Train, Silver Birch Press, Flying Island, Awaken Consciousness, Writers‘ Bloc, Red-Headed Stepchild and Laureate: The Literary Journal of Arts for Lawrence. One of his poems was on display at the National Museum of Sport and another is painted on a barn in Boone County, Indiana as part of Brick Street Poetry‘s Word Hunger public art project. His poems are also included in these anthologies: From the Edge of the Prairie; Motif 3: All the Livelong Day; and Twin Muses: Art and Poetry.

He graduated a long time ago with a major in English from Ball State University.