winter 2012 issue

The Meadowland Review

Cover Image

Dil pe

Oil/Acrylic

By Merlin Flower

Megan Duffy Poetry Editor

Lauren Cerruto Poetry Editor

Jennifer Walkup Fiction Editor

For submission guidelines please visit www.themeadowlandreview.com Questions or comments: [email protected]

Copyright © 2012 by The Meadowland Review. All rights are one-time rights for this journal.

http://www.themeadowlandreview.com/

mailto:[email protected]

The Meadowland Review Winter 2012

Page 1

Poetry

Savannah Thorne Wolfsong 3

Martin Willitts, Jr. Memorial Tree 4

Changming Yuan Snow vs Crow 5

Jessie Carty The Stylist The Mummy

6 7

Nandini Dhar Behind the Stalks of Reeds 9

Marie Abate The Chicken Soup of Mornings After 10

Matthew Ulland Tenebrae 11

Joseph Somoza Only Natural 12

Leigh Anne Hornfeldt The Cemetery 13

Sue Ann Connaughton Recollections of the Fisherman’s Wife 14

Laura Madeline Wiseman Model-T 16

Nels Hanson Eastward Ho! 17

Maureen Kingston Boxcars Poetica Spring Forward

18 20

Fiction

P.S. Duffy Silver from Paradise 22

Sonja Vitow Worry Dolls 24

Photography and Art

Louie Crew Versailles Peasants 1957 2

Merlin Flower Embrace As In Passive

8 21

Contributors 32


Poetry

Versailles Peasants 1957

by Louie Crew


Page 3

Savannah Thorne Wolfsong

I am not so far from your cry,

Your agonizing throb

Urgent real and mad

Drifting to the moon white as a stone.

Let me be with you just once

Before you turn away from me:

Shimmering silver fur,

Smart-aleck, lolling tongue,

Sparking eyes, black lips—

The dream that trails grave-clothes in mist.

Your stillness—utter—

And your madstone song

Pierce to the blood of the earth.

You live skin to skin,

Mind to mind, soul to soul,

And that is the secret of the sound:

Sublime as leaves to forest floor

Echoed cry of tears

Monstrous in loss.

Disturb my soul.

Unrest me.

Corrupt my thoughts.

Breathe your virulent contagion breath,

Intimate and omniscient

As falling rain

As voices in my head

As bones in my body

Irresistible:

Come, darling. Come, darling.

Oh God I never knew.


Martin Willitts, Jr.

Memorial Tree Coal would rumble down a shute into the bin that is no longer there, black dust coughing. My mother told me, my father had lost his hearing in the war. I went outside searching for it. I buried some toy German soldiers; I dug up forty years later planting a memorial tree. Later I found a pirate map I had drawn showing their location. They were still green plastic, fighting dirt, the color of coal dust. I was up past bedtime, excavating re-call.

Someone pruned the memorial tree into nothingness, branches empty in surrender. I was used to speaking loudly and clearly so my father could read lips. Now I had silence, searching through the coughing dark, my hands were green plastic.

Coal rumbling above, my voice so loud, I had to remember to keep it down; people were sleeping, far away from wars. We all make maps of hiding places we forget about.

I was trying to summon up why I planted the tree, who I was memorizing, what the occupation of Normandy had to do with anything, which pirate I wanted to be when I grew up, why I anticipated coal delivery with fear and anticipation, how it was deaf.

We live in our ancestry of forgetfulness until something is retrieved like a buried toy. Why had I blamed the green German soldier for my father’s hearing since my father had been in the Pacific, listening for enemy aircraft?

Sometimes childhood makes no sense; we prune back memories until empty branches remain.


Page 5

Changming Yuan

Snow vs Crow

Like billions of dark butterflies

Beating their wings against dreams

Or myriads of spirited coal

spread from the sky of another world

A heavy black snow falls, falling

Down towards the horizon of my mind

Where a little white crow is trying

To fly from bough to bough


Jessie Carty

The Stylist

The sign said hair stylist

because people pay more

for style which implies

design - shaping - a way -

a mode - genre - like sci-fi/action

- an up-do with a flipped

edge for romantic comedies

The sign would not say hair

dresser - which can be snappy -

good - but also a chest of drawers -

as if the head was just a place

in which to store things.


Page 7

Jessie Carty The Mummy

She planned on being a cowboy

for Halloween. Not a cowgirl.

Not the girl with a lasso

and a skirt but the boy with a pistol

and chaps; both with hats,

spurs, and fringe.

Instead she is ringing door after door

wrapped in loose scraps of sheets,

explaining she is a mummy.

She can’t, however, tell

how her costume

is a punishment

because she was caught

with an ace bandage

wound tightly;

how she used it to speak

down her breasts

which were so

talkative against her undershirts.

You just don’t do that

her mother said.

You just don’t.


Embrace

By Merlin Flower


Page 9

Nandini Dhar

Behind the Stalks of Reeds

My mother was a skinny girl who liked to read.

Born in a small town without a single library,

She, very early on, learnt to belong to that strange breed

who swallowed words, leaving behind every other creed

without feeling deeply sorry, contrary or arbitrary

My mother was a skinny girl who liked to read.

A book on her lap, hiding behind the stalks of reeds,

hungering for libraries as if they were patisseries,

she, very early on, learnt to belong to that strange breed

of girls who would flee before learning to plead--

would hop on trains, not listening to words cautionary.

My mother was a skinny girl who liked to read

who wondered why girls in books were made dead

when they tried to grab a taste of the commentary

She,very early on, learnt to belong to that strange breed--

between novelty and anomaly, got it stuck in her head,

she needed to change the plot-lines of the books in the library

My mother was a skinny girl who liked to read:

never learnt overly well to hide her alphabet-greed.


Marie Abate

The Chicken Soup of Mornings After

It all seems silly to her now,

those lipstick-rimmed coffee cups,

the chicken soup of mornings after.

She will go home alone, to dust

a forgotten floor, make an unmade bed.

Tomorrow he might go outside to buy The Sun.

She will read a beautiful story that is not hers.

It will not be silly to her later

when she sees him on the street,

toed between car and curb, keys jangling.

They will act just like forgotten friends,

arms outstretched

to sun and pulse points,

as if his heated mouth never touched this silence,

as if goodbyes never spilled from coffee cups,

and a muted moon never dropped between them,

bright and thick and glowing in yesterday’s sky.


Page 11

Matthew Ulland

Tenebrae

Blown out candles, wax cold,

dark house winged closed—

what lingers is old.

Soot smudges the stations.

The world stumbles fourteen stops

toward the ash trough.

Dove and rat, Paraclete

and parasite, Blood and blood.

There is blood and suspiration—

the body and its shadow—

where there had been

breath in clay, over the void.

Shrouded and trampled, lashed,

bent by the bent world, bruised

by blood-bruised fists, used

to what end?—bone-silent.

Somewhere there had been

Thou and I.

Night

extinguishes day.


Joseph Somoza

Only Natural

I’d write a narrative poem

if I had a story.

Maybe if I began it

“he.”

But a bird

flies into the locust tree in front of

my eyes and I

can’t help but watch him try to

huddle among the

skeletal branches.

It’s winter, you know.

Even down here it gets cold.

I may be old

but I still know about

huddling,

under a featherbed,

with a sweetwoman,

and it’s nothing like

perching

on a locust branch,

in winter,

alone.

A motorcycle starts up and

idles a while.

Any second now, this poem may

go off somewhere unexpected.


Page 13

Leigh Anne Hornfeldt

The Cemetery

I. The Swiftness of the Hare

Walnuts litter the ground,

the mottled husks split and fume.

Robins throw

their notes into the air

and from the deep of the evergreen

bed a rabbit springs, young

this season and scared.

There is stillness apart

from all else till he turns tail, recedes

to the dark of the den.

II. In-Between

In the shirred taffeta

lining of the box

there is no red

of Dresden flame,

stars guard

their permeable distance.

The earth cannot consider

the dead, that is the burden

of the living.

III. After Visiting

The hands hover, too light

once the weight of flowers has gone,

and the fingers wince, worn pink

from tracing a family name on a headstone.

Evening settles like dust on a bureau

and the sky has never been

such a lilac opened over the horizon.

The slender arm of light

that slips through the clouds

untethered at this end of the cosmos

has never reached quite so far in greeting.


Sue Ann Connaughton

Recollections of the Fisherman’s Wife

My heartbeat frantic, I lay waiting. I sensed my husband’s form, drenched in sea mist and bronzed by the sun. The sun rose over the sea. How I longed for his presence at our child’s birth. At sunset, he arrived! He arrived during the boy’s first scream. Strong lungs, I agreed, for calling to crew over sounds from a foghorn. A foghorn moaned, all night. I gathered the boy to my breast and rocked to the moaning. Finally, we slept. We slept fitfully. A messenger stopped by. A fishing boat—not my husband’s—capsized. The crew was lost, every person. Every person in the fishing community attended Mass, a funeral Mass to pray for spectral fishermen, who haunt the sea. The sea sustained my husband’s kin. His ancestors fished for their livelihood. They taught their sons, who teach their sons. Their sons often numbered five, or six—a full crew. We found joy with the one child our Lord allotted. Allotted good health, a fine family, and a prosperous fishing business, we thrived. I neither needed, nor desired anything more. More fishing competition led to smaller hauls and lower prices. Our business profits dwindled. Wherever possible, I whittled our expenses. Expenses soared for doctor’s visits and medicine for our son. Scarlet Fever sent him to the hospital. True melancholy followed. Melancholy followed my husband, chased him from my bed, our home. Our son recovered, but my husband lingered in darkness. Darkness hovered. Still, our son grew tall, bright. Claiming heritage, he implored his father to teach him how fishermen traded. Traded turbulence for calm: through daily tutoring, father and son learned from each


Page 15

other and our tattered family mended together. Together, we celebrated the Feast of St. Peter, patron saint of fishermen, with Mass, procession, the blessing of the fleet. The fleet readied dockside. My husband’s boat embarked before dawn without our son, who had turned feverish in the night. The night raven’s caws awakened me. He circled a robin’s nest outside my window, foraging for chick-flesh. I smelled lightning. Lightning? Not lightning, I smelled, but burnt cinders from my husband’s boat. A fiery explosion had strewn his ashes seaward. Seaward, I searched vainly, like women who came before me and those who will come after, each a fisherman’s widow. A fisherman’s widow, I lowered a veil over my face and mourned. The next morning, my son went to sea.


Laura Madeline Wiseman

Model-T Polk County, Iowa, 1924

The roads aren’t paved yet. The driver sits behind the wheel

to pose for a mid-trip photo. Ticking off the lost spaces

between farm and prairie, each fence post has been hewn

by hand and driven into the dark loam by bodily force,

to offer new travelers a silver line to guide them forward

as they crest each hill flanked by windbreaks of elm and oak

and descend into humid valleys where redwing blackbirds call

to the beasts that honk and rumble and flash their yellow eyes.


Page 17

Nels Hanson

Eastward Ho!

In the high cupboard cookbooks sleep

from Grandmother’s mother, brittle pages

for ’possum and squirrel, raccoon, black

bear and wild boar, that call for strange

spices—morning glory, wolfbane, sassafras,

blue sage. And recipes for quince desserts,

hard sauces no one makes anymore. Who

needs the spruce spoon and rolling pin,

grinder with a handle for hamburger

gravy over biscuits? The tin saucer nailed

to the ceiling hides the chimney pipe’s hole.

The woodstove served to cook and heat

and pioneer women made angel food cakes.

Years it’s waited in the barn’s empty stall,

warmer ovens full of sparrows’ nests. Now

lift the collars, hitch the Belgians to the tongue,

load its cast iron in the bed and drive away fast

the haunted wagon that remembers its wheels.


Maureen Kingston

Boxcars Poetica

A crane shot of the plains wide-angle. I’m the crane. How many frames per second? I’ve lost count of the colored slides rolling by their mounds backlit Wyoming coal thrusting eastbound. I’m the dawn too lighting the Wind River cutthroat orange dredged in fugitive dust deep-fried


Page 19

in subtraction. Never the money shot or the movie’s star just the one dissolving at the end of each day trying to survive the trend of cinéma vérité.


Maureen Kingston

Spring Forward

When the light

changes

I see them,

bug tattoos

in the porch globe,

fallen bodies

bulb-dried

to frosted glass--

silenced commas

and curled compass

needles, lost bearings

without sentience

or latitude.

Did they swarm off stage?

Did their wings

spit flamenco flames?

Or was suffocation

the invisible

coup de grace?

Sometimes

all the crystal ball

reveals

are burnt shadows

on cave walls.


Page 21

Fiction

As In Passive

By Merlin Flower


P.S. Duffy

Silver from Paradise

He liked to talk about his grandfather because he never knew him and never

would. Left home with some silverware wrapped in a linen cloth, he’d say. Because

that’s the kind of boy he was, a boy who was thinking of his future, of the great

beyond, and his place in it. The kind of boy who would be prepared for a decent cut

of meat, even if he had to skin and butcher it himself. A boy who would lay a proper

table, tie a linen cloth around his neck, and share what bounty he had.

He liked to say his grandfather used another linen cloth to wrap the baby,

then laid it in a little pine coffin he’d made with his own two hands and left it in the

icehouse. How he wrapped up the silverware, then wrapped up his two brothers and

his soft-headed sister in their woolens and scarves and mittens and set off. Turn of

the century. Turn of the tide. A boy of sixteen with three little ones leaning one to

another against the wild wind like a line of dinghies in his wake. How they got from

their home in Paradise to Hanover is anyone’s guess. But they ate the game that he

shot and potatoes he dug and holed up together and lived like kings with money he

earned for fresh-churned butter which he spread on their potatoes with a silver knife.

He told it once that his grandfather’s father joined a logging crew down in

Aroostook and never came back, and that his mother died of fever in childbirth. But

the father hadn’t run off, and there never was a baby. He made that part up to add a

layer of desolation over the whole departure, the low snow flying in a low gray sky

as they lowered the coffins—deaths he felt necessary to the telling, because what he

didn’t say was that it was the pitchfork ravings in the woodshed at night and a

mother who sought the comfort of a boy in her bed that put his grandfather on the

run, dragging Wister and Ben and Lydia up to Sussex and down through New

Brunswick and across the border and into the tall, dark woods and low-slung bogs

of Maine. And that the haunting of cutlery splayed across the floor from a pitched-

over cupboard kept him on the move, finally to Boston where Ben and Wister went


Page 23

their own way and where he took a wife and had some children of his own and set a

proper table with a roast on Sundays, with Lydia attached to his hip until her death

them did part, until his grown children fled and never spoke to him again, which

suited him fine, since by then he was alone up in Waterville in a broken-down

farmstead, its weathered boards helpless against a stranglehold of vines—a twisted

sorrow of a place where blueberry bushes tangled with boulders down to a spongy

fen that moldered at the bottom of a stump-filled field where he swung an ax and

wrote down doggerel and dug up potatoes, which he ate with a silver fork, polished

off with blueberry grunt, ladled up with a silver spoon, and where, under the stars at

night, he chased it all back with whiskey straight from the bottle, and declared

himself in Paradise.

He didn’t know his grandfather, and never would, and never could because

he’d been kept safe away from the farm in Maine where bad things might happen if

he were a boy alone in a room with a grandfather like that who might threaten him

with a silver knife or stab his arm with a silver fork. Because Waterville wasn’t

Paradise any more than Paradise itself. But he didn’t tell that part, as he lay dying,

because a boy of sixteen deserved his due for saving some children from having

neither food to eat nor silverware to eat it with and for providing a sliver of silver to

the storm-filled clouds above.


Sonja Vitow

Worry Dolls

When Helen’s mother returned from her trip to South America, where she

had gone to get her groove back, she brought home a small, oblong box wrapped in

turquoise tissue paper for her daughter. Helen opened it ceremoniously, unfolding

the lid without breathing so as not to rattle its contents. The wood seemed so thin

and light that she could crack it open like an egg if she wasn’t careful.

“I think it’s balsa,” Helen’s mother said, when asked about the strange

lightness of the wood. “It’s from Guatemala.”

The word balsa reminded Helen of dancing, so she liked it. Inside the box,

she found five colorful dolls so tiny that she could fit them all in the palm of her

hand. They were made of two crossed twigs wrapped in differently colored threads

for clothes. Two were wearing pants, and three had on long skirts made of

patterned fabric. Their arms were fixed into small hugs, they had smooth orange

faces with three dots for features, and something hard and black for hair that was

rough to the touch but sparkled in the light.

“These are called worry dolls,” her mother said. “You put them under your

pillow at night, and they will feel your worries for you, and dream your nightmares

so you don’t have to.”

Helen gently placed the dolls back in their box. She pictured her mother,

wrapped luxuriously in an exotic sarong, venturing into unknown territory and

facing unprecedented dangers to bring home this gift. No wonder she had not been

invited to come along. She had spent the week with a babysitter who let her order

pizza each night but wouldn’t let her pick the toppings.

“Where did you find these? How did you know about them? Did you have to

ride a camel to get there?” Helen asked.

I found them at the airport gift shop,” her mother said, “And it’s a good thing

I did, they’re just what you needed.”


Page 25

Helen wanted to name her dolls, but she wasn’t certain what kind of name

comes from South America. She felt foolish asking, so she decided instead to name

them each after cookies. Mrs. Fields was the mother doll, Famous Amos was the

father, and their children were Chips Ahoy, Lorna Doone, and Little Debbie. Little

Debbies, of course, are not really cookies, but Helen thought they deserved a

mention, and gave the name to the smallest doll, which was her favorite.

That night, Helen settled into bed with the funny box tucked away beneath

her pillows, but she couldn’t sleep. She felt bad for putting all of her worries on

these little dolls, who had not done anything to deserve them, and who would

probably be overwhelmed by the weight of her sleeping head. With the lights out,

she could feel the solid lump of the box no matter how hard she tried to avoid it.

After several hours in the dark, Helen summoned the courage to leap from her

bed, out of reach of any monster hiding beneath it, down the hall, past her father’s

empty study, into the room where her mother slept. She crawled into bed beside her.

“We can’t have this again, Helen,” her mother said, rubbing her eyes.

“The box is too hard,” Helen explained, as her mother led her back to her

bedroom. “I can feel it no matter where I put my head.”

“Why do you need the box? It kind of looks like a coffin anyway. Just stick the

dolls under your pillow.”

“But that’s their home,” Helen insisted. “That’s where they live.” She

wondered briefly if they missed Guatemala.

“Come on, Helen. It’s late. Stop being contrary.”

Helen did not know what contrary meant, but it reminded her of a yellow bird,

so she liked it. Against her best judgment, she allowed her mother to push the dolls

beneath her pillow. But as soon as her mother left, Helen rearranged the dolls into a

neat row, so they could at least sleep side-by-side. When she put her head down, she

couldn’t feel the dolls at all, and was able to sleep just fine.

The next morning, when she peeked beneath her pillow, Helen found four

whole worry dolls next to one splintered version of Famous Amos, whose body was

contorted into a terrible shape. One of his wooden arms had fallen off completely,


and a leg was bent over his shoulder as if he intended to carry it that way. She

located the missing arm, but it was too small to reattach with rubber cement.

Panicked, she ran down the hall to find her mother, who was on the phone.

She heard her say the word “alimony,” which filled her nose with a sour smell, and

she did not like it.

“Mom, I need you,” she said, tugging at her mother’s elbow, “Hurry, Famous

Amos is broken. And he’s the dad doll.”

Helen’s mother said, “Oh Lord, hang on a sec,” into the receiver.

“How do you know it’s the dad doll?”

“He’s the biggest,” said Helen, “And I broke him.”

“I bet he’ll still work.”

But Helen was not satisfied. She returned to the other dolls, placing them

back into their box: Mrs. Fields in her patterned skirt, Lorna Doone, whose head

glittered the most, Chips Ahoy, with his extra-long arms, and Little Debbie, the

smallest, with her little lopsided face. First she made a tiny bandage from a bit of

Kleenex and stuck Famous Amos in the box with the others, but when she looked in

the box, she felt a bit sad, and besides, his arm wouldn’t stay in the bandage and

kept almost getting lost. She decided to put the arm-twig in with the family, and

stick the rest of Famous Amos under her pillow, where he stayed. He was already

broken, so there was no risk, really, and this way she would always know where he

was. After that day, she slept well for a while.


Page 27

Contributors Marie Abate is a writer and editor. She completed an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University in December 2011. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Jessie Carty's writing has appeared in publications such as, MARGIE,

decomP and Connotation Press. She is the author of four poetry collections which

include Fat Girl (Sibling Rivalry, 2011) as well as the award winning full length

poetry collection, Paper House (Folded Word 2010). Jessie teaches at RCCC in

Concord, NC. She is also the editor for Referential Magazine. She can be found

around the web, especially at http://jessiecarty.com.

Sue Ann Connaughton writes poetry and short fiction from an eighteenth century, perukemaker’s house in Massachusetts. Her poetry has appeared in Subliminal Interiors; South Boston Literary Gazette; American Tanka; Modern English Tanka;Bete Noire; Every Day Poets; Twenty20 Journal. Louie Crew, an Alabama native, 75, is an emeritus professor at Rutgers and lives in East Orange, NJ, with Ernest Clay, his husband of 37 years. As of today, editors have published 2,163 of Crew's poems and essays. Crew has edited special issues of College English and Margins. He has written four poetry volumes, Sunspots (Lotus Press, Detroit, 1976)Midnight Lessons (Samisdat, 1987), Lutibelle's Pew (Dragon Disks, 1990), and Queers! for Christ's Sake!(Dragon Disks, 2003). You can follow his work at http://rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pubs.html. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Crew. The University of Michigan collects Crew’s papers. Contact Crew at [email protected].

Nandini Dhar's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Muse India, Kritya,

Mascara Literary Review, Off the Coast, Pratilipi, tinfoildresses, First Literary Review,

Poetry Quarterly, Stonetelling,Up the Staircase, Hawaii Review, Prick of the Spindle,

lingerpost, Palooka, Inkscrawl, Chanterelle's Notebook, Cartographer: A Literary Review,

Cabinet des Fees, Penwood Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Melusine and Asia

Writes. A Pushcart nominee, Nandini grew up in Kolkata, India, and received an

M.A. in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta and another

M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Currently, she is a

Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at University of Texas at Austin.

P.S. Duffy lives with her husband in Rochester, MN where she is a freelance science

writer for the Mayo Clinic, specializing in the neurosciences. She has a doctorate

from the University of Minnesota and is author of A Stockbridge Homecoming, a

http://jessiecarty.com/

http://rci.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pubs.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louie_Crew

mailto:[email protected]


memoir of her family’s experience in China during the 1940’s. She has published

stories, including the lead story in Steady as She Goes, a collection of women’s

experiences at sea. She has just completed a novel that takes place in Nova Scotia

and on the Western Front during the First World War.

Merlin Flower is an independent artist and writer. On

twitter: http://twitter.com/merlinflower. Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher, and contract writer/editor. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz and the University of Montana and his fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award. His stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Montreal Review, and other journals. Poems have appeared in Big Moon, Language and Culture, Angelfire, and Symmetry Pebbles. Hanson lives with his wife, Vicki, on the Central Coast of California. Leigh Anne Hornfeldt lives in Kentucky with her husband and three young sons. Her poems have appeared in Foundling Review, Literary Mama, Untitled Country Review, Plain Spoke, and elsewhere. Audio of Leigh Anne reading her work can be found online at Soundzine and Red Lion Sq. She is currently finalizing her first chapbook, East Main Aviary. Maureen Kingston lives and works in eastern Nebraska. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Centrifugal Eye, Lily, Pirene’s Fountain, Poetry Quarterly, Psychic Meatloaf, Red River Review and The Smoking Poet. Joseph Somoza retired from college teaching a while back to have more time for writing. He's published 8 books and chapbooks of poetry over the years, most recently Shock of White Hair (Sin Fronteras, 2007). He lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with wife Jill, a painter. Savannah Thonre’s poetry has appeared in over a dozen regional and international literary journals such as The Iowa Rag, The Missouri Review, Mudvein, Potpourri, The Wisconsin Review, Earthwords, Rhino, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Lyric, Parabola and The Atlanta Review and has won several poetry awards. Savannah has just become managing editor of Conclave: a Journal of Character. She holds cum laude master’s degrees, and a BA from the University of Iowa where she graduated from the Writer’s Workshop. Matthew Ulland’s poems and essays have been published in LIT, Naugatuck River Review, Hanging Loose, caesura and other journals. Matthew has published one chapbook, The Sound in the Corn, and is working on a full-length poetry manuscript. Matthew lives in the woods north of New York City in a house full of dogs.


Page 29

Martin Willitts Jr was nominated for two Best of The Net awards and his 5th Pushcart award. He has had eight poetry chapbooks accepted this year including “True Simplicity” (Poets Wear Prada Press, 2011), “My Heart Is Seven Wild Swans Lifting” (Slow Trains, 2011), “Why Women Are A Ribbon Around A Bomb” (Last Automat, 2011), “Art Is Always an Impression of What an Artist Sees” (Muse Café, 2011), “Protest, Petition, Write, Speak: Matilda Joslyn Gage Poems” (Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, 2011), How To Find Peace” (Kattywumpus Press, 2011), “Swimming In The Ladle Of Stars” (Pudding House, 2011) and “Secrets No One Wants To Talk About” (Dos Madres Press, 2011). Laura Madeline Wiseman is the author of five chapbooks, including BRANDING GIRLS (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poetry, prose, and reviews have appeared in Cream City Review, 13th Moon, Prairie Schooner, Margie, Arts & Letters, Southern Indiana Review, Blackbird, South Loop Review, American Short Fiction, Poet Lore, and elsewhere Changming Yuan, (co-)author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Three Poets (2011) as well as a four-time Pushcart nominee, grew up in rural China and published several monographs before moving to North America. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan teaches in Vancouver and has poetry appearing in over four hundred literary publications in eighteen countries, including Alba, Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poems Online, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse and Meadowland Review.


The Meadowland Review

www.themeadowlandreview.com

winter 2012 issue

Documents

meadowland review winter

memorial tree coal

poetry versailles peasants

martin willitts

duffy silver

black lips

black dust coughing

color of coal dust