Poet and photographer, Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press, 2015), and two chapbooks, Shedding Our Skins (2008), and Some Other Eden (2005), both from Finishing Line Press. Her work has been a finalist with the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and Four Way Books Levis Prize, and she is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, Tahoma, Passages North, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry , and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered.

Ronda is a graduate of the University of Washington, with degrees in Creative Writing, Art, and Photography, and is currently a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop. She has taught poetry workshops to students from grade school to high school levels. She is a photographer (wilderness, occasional weddings, book covers, and portraits), and a digital artist, creating photo art collages, such as the image on the cover of this book. More photos and artwork can be found at www.fineartamerica.com/profiles/ronda-broatch .

Visit her website at www.rondapiszkbroatch.com

The Photographer Who Made Sense of the Universe

She decides chaos theory belongs to a guest
class of stars and explains away the periodic table
to a linen closet of tablecloths and miracles

in skyfall gray. She imagines a future of champagne
and applause where dreams are remembered
by their presence on the tongue. Hard to swallow,

paradoxical at best. The matter of becoming wave
or participant? She creates minor entropies, carries
moon seeds in her pockets, chalks constellations 

in anamorphic perspectives. The photographer 
contemplates the moon’s navel, the roughness 
of the lunar face. She tips the universe like an hourglass,

sweeps each stellar remnant, each Planck-length bit 
of glitter under the rug and pops the cork.

This is a Language of Simple, Obvious Things

     —after a line by Anna Moschovakis

how the wife cuts asparagus into lengths
the steamer will accept, how the husband
clears the table of bills, expired
subscriptions the wife collects. She pulls
potatoes out of the oven, broils
her knuckles—just briefly—
while the husband draws knives, forks,
from their slotted beds, plunks them
on the scrubbed pine where books of poetry, odes
to joy and mammography
reminders rest in a neat stack at its head.
The wife carves the roast, drops a slice
onto a blue platter with orange
carrots the husband awakes from someplace
just beneath reach of the sun.