Featured Poet: Joanne Merriam, Concord
 Joanne Merriam is a Nova Scotian transplanted to New Hampshire. She
writes both literary and speculative poems, which have appeared in
dozens of periodicals including The Fiddlehead, Room of One's Own and
Strange Horizons. Her book, The Glaze from Breaking (Stride, 2005),
was called "sharp and vivid" by Verse. She lives in Concord with her
husband and two rabbits.
Of her featured poem, Joanne writes:
"Most of the poems for The Glaze from Breaking were written when I had
just met the man who is now my husband. I had seen a pretty awful
late-night movie about alien plants which grew so fast they could
immobilize the hapless people who found them, and that got me
thinking. This prose poem was the result."
Footprints Drying on the Stairs
The sensations will germinate slowly. Too much can trigger rampant
growth, stems everywhere brown as footprints drying on the stairs and
with those insufficient thorns, but few flowers.
Better start them from the seed indoors, in baskets filled with peat
and woven out of all the ellipses and scraps of old verb tenses you
have lying around the house, watered by all you never say, weeks ahead
of their last frost date.
The buds will open crazy as bats in a crawlspace. But regardless,
after the blossoming, petals on the wind,
the going-to-seed. You want me to believe we aren't like those
flowers, your voice rough with the strain of all that watering.
For more information on Joanne Merriam visit:
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