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Andrea L. Watson's poetry has appeared in Runes, The Comstock Review,
Room of One's Own, Earth's Daughters, Georgetown Review, among others. She has been
nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Her show, "Braided Lives: A Collaboration Between Artists and Poets", was
sponsored by the Taos Institute of Arts in 2003; travelled to San Francisco's SomArts Cultural Center in 2005;
and was hosted by Tennyson Gallery, Denver, CO, RANE Gallery, Taos, NM, and Studio Rasa, Berkeley, CA in 2006. She is
co-editor of HeartLodge: Honoring the House of the Poet.
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Re/enchanting the Red Artist
he will return to the studio long abandoned
you will find this parched moon
white willow scent portent
hear rumors deafness of his soundful eyes
blindness of his seeing hands
but you know the secret
ways seven shades beyond
heart cold
he has no name for the palette of you:
mouth cusp of pomegranate throat
garnets on witch’s wire rouge of rubies
warms each breast your center burns
carnelian
you are flame you are blood embers you are
hearth fashioned of flesh-seam and memory
the place he already comes to
earth thaw in strokes of red/red
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Apprentice to the Secret
I have studied sorrowful mystery,
five gray stones in a field near
skeleton corn, bone dry kernels
scattered at random by crows.
Today, Weir’s Pond is frozen
with skim of just-winter and
the ground is moody as memory
when truth is hammered hard.
Someone has left lilies in a mason jar
near the cross whittled by a stranger
who maybe read about it or heard
rumors, then searched for cradle
of earth that at summer’s bend rocked
something translucent, even in stillness
still breathing. Did I know then
to practice unremembering?
I have kept our pact, sister,
indentured to that dream world where
you slipped down splinter stairs
carrying your careless sleep
and secrets to the broken place:
only a barelegged ghost could bury
bed cloth, then birth cloth, stitching
swaddling into clotted shroud.
Seven years now I joined the guild
of family, our trade of shadows ragged
sustenance from ribbons and veins pulsing
me to serve my master, blood silence.
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Storm Warnings
My neighbor stands on her doorstep, arms
the color of adobe, pulling the tortoise brush
down her scooped back, through her long hair,
until it seems a ribbon-work of restless water.
She tells me her bedroom has been captured
by a loom, replacing a swath of shadow strands
with threads of saffron, indigo, pomegranate.
The Tlingit tribe believes
when a woman brushes her hair outside
her front door, storms will come.
I watch Adelina on Wednesday from my window.
She beckons me inside. The weave is everything,
she tells me, more magnificent than the design.
Friday, her blue door opens to skeins of showers:
I make my fish-plans 'though there are hair-knots
and her fingers tangle in the dawn-washed web.
At the river, I cast and reel, while clouds form a carpet,
torrential rains quick coming. Line and leader balancing
to the rod, I lose bump of metallic blue shading to silver
as storms slow trouts' leaping time. Will I leave
emptyhanded?
Later, on my porch, I find a prophecy wrapped in paper,
her tightly wefted tapestry of rainbows, and I think
our friendship is like her hair, hip deep and braided.
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2004-2007 the Dublin Quarterly--to see familiar things with unfamiliar eyes!
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