Lois Marie Harrod

“A Small Parenthesis in Eternity”
     Sir Thomas Browne


The morning came
like a faded photograph
sucking the color
out of the trees.
Everything lost its motion
except a woman
moving through the gray.
She remembered
the child in a story
where everything stopped–
the filcher, the raker
the candystick maker
fixed like statues
around the square
so that the child
could slide among them
restoring what
had been lost, the coin
to the old lady’s wallet,
the red leaf to the oak,
the forgotten oil to the peppermint.
And the woman wondered
whether such stillness
was a common curse
or a cheaper blessing,
what should she lift
from this moment when
the world’s heavy commerce
seemed suspended, no gravity,
the letter unopened
on her desk, the baseball
inches from her son’s glove,
her husband’s car still
on the road
while the steel whistle
fluted on as if
breath were endless.
Then a raindrop fell
and that was it–
a sycamore shivered,
a mosquito lifted
from his larva,
a window opened,
the woman resumed her life
in a moving world,
no longer able to readjust
where she had been.





Lois Marie Harrod's chapbook Firmament is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her Put Your Sorry Side Out was published by Concrete Wolf in 2005, and she won a 2003 poetry fellowship, her third, from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Her sixth book of poetry Spelling the World Backward (2000) was published by Palanquin Press, University of South Carolina Aiken, which also published her chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999) and her book Part of the Deeper Sea(l997). Over 300 of her poems have appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, Blueline, The MacGuffin, Salt, The Literary Review, Zone3. Her earlier publications include the books Every Twinge a Verdict (Belle Mead Press, l987), Crazy Alice (Belle Mead Press, l991) and a chapbook Green Snake Riding (New Spirit Press, l994).






Mark Lamoureux Lois Marie Harrod Sam Silva Eve Rifkah Christopher Barnes Roger Singer David McLean