Featured Poet: Pat Parnell, Stratham
 Pat Parnell is author of two published collections of poetry, Snake Woman and Other Explorations, Finding the Female in Divinity (2001) and Talking with Birches, Poems of Family and Everyday Life. (2004), with a third collection in process, Masks and Mirrors. She is Professor Emerita in the writing program of Chester College of New England, Chester, where she also served as co-editor of Compass Rose, the college’s journal of the literary and visual arts. She is currently conference coordinator for the Seacoast Writers Association and associate editor of The Poet’s Touchstone, the quarterly journal of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. She enjoys reading her poems to an audience, appearing frequently as a workshop presenter, featured reader, and Open Mike reader.
Of her Showcase poem Pat writes:
"Word Become Flesh" reflects a theme common to many of my poems, the immanence of the divine in everyday life. It was directly inspired by a painting I saw in a gallery, a life-sized head of Jesus, with mirrors for the eyes.
Word Become Flesh
The Creative Force of the Universe
eats chicken enchiladas at Taco Bell,
drinks a well-pulled pint of Guinness at the pub,
walks our sidewalks, drives our cars.
(Divinity picks a pink Hummer.)
Showers, uses the toilet,
feels the urgency of our sins.
Nothing human is alien to God.
Today God puts on my face,
adjusts the white fright-wig of my hair,
velcro’s on the fat-suit of my body,
goes to the Mall.
I see God walking toward me
through Better Dresses in Filene’s.
“Who is that fat old lady?
She looks familiar.”
As we get closer,
God morphs into a mirror.
I recognize the Divine
in my eyes.
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