Description
- Kind: Perfect Bound, Full Color
- Pages: 46
- Language: English
- Published: April, 2012
- ISBN: 978-1-933675-70-1
Excerpt
Breakfast Food, 1944
No talking at the table, Mother
shushing at the sink, good smells of toast
and coffee as my father studies maps
in the newspaper to French villages,
German cities, the radio spewing news
fast as the sleet against the window.
Juice at my place, oatmeal
with a melted pool of brown sugar,
a capsule of cod liver oil to ruin
everything, while across an ocean
my parents’ seven nephews wake
in foxholes or return from flight.
As my father tries to guess
where each may be, his pencil follows
the shores of the gray Atlantic. Days
after the night it happens,
a phone call tells him that two of them
have gone down together in one plane.
June 6, rain on the window,
corn flakes in a bowl, Jamie
with a forty-pound radio strapped
to his back, men pressing against him,
waiting for a metal ramp to fall
and give them to the beach,
unimagined details that we dread
and hunger for that Sunday morning,
a day for waiting, for prayers.
All we taste is terror,
and everything that matters
remains unknown.
About the Author & Artist
Ann (Brashear) Loveland and Lianne (Valleau) Spidel met in high school in Detroit and went together to Wittenberg University in Ohio, Ann as a Fine Arts major, Lianne as an English major.
Both went on to teach and to raise families, Ann in Michigan, Lianne in Ohio, continuing to share their friendship and their work. In 2006, with the help of Ralph Pedersen, Ann’s husband, they self-published an Apple book, Pairs, linking–the logic is theirs alone–still life paintings with poems mostly about people.
In the years since, they have continued to look for connections in their finished work, as well as to paint to poems and write poems to paintings, beginning with “Daughters of Eve,” the painting based on the poem of the same name. The book Pairings is one result.
