Lias Ashley: Oubliettes of Light
These are embodied poems where voices of ancestors “roost” inside a child, break windowpanes
of silence, and fill heavy buckets, where childhood memories sashay to Glenn Miller or crackle
like bacon rashers in a skillet, where peace is “feral as a fox at dusk.” Bodies are in peril
here—subject to predation, at risk of war or imprisonment—but in Oubliettes of Light, Lisa
Ashley generously gathers it all in, and not a petal escapes without a “clamor of joy.”
—Bethany Reid, author of Sparrow and The Pear Tree
CROWN SHYNESS
“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky.”
Kahlil Gibran
Trees talk belowground,
web a wide net
of kin recognition in the dark.
Sisters at a reunion
they chat, feed one another, share water.
Above ground birch trees glint
white, a family gathering.
At their crowns they connect
without touching, branches
channel like braids of the Madison River.
Trees gap for safety,
disease prevention, or to avoid
colliding in storms.
It’s the idea of collaboration I like most.
Sightless, they saturate forest sky.
Lying on my back I see their oubliettes of light.
In the stillness I hear them breathe for me,
feel their silent pull like a prayer.
Lisa Ashley writes in her log home among the firs on Bainbridge Island, WA, having found her
way there from rural New York by way of Montana and Seattle. Lisa Ashley is a Pushcart Prize
nominee who descends from Armenian genocide survivors. She has spent many years listening
to, and supporting, incarcerated youth. She earned a BA in journalism from the University of
Montana School of Journalism and a Master of Divinity from Seattle University. Her poems can
be found in Willows Wept Review, Juniper, Blue Heron Review, and many other journals.
Oubliettes of Light is her first collection and was a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award, 2024..
Visit Lisa's page at MoonPathPress.com
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Cindy Veach: Monster Galaxy
Cindy Veach’s Monster Galaxy is a beautiful collection buzzing with memory monsters, tender
girlhood, haunting grief, and startling selves. These poems are viscerally felt, with images that
linger in vivid synesthesia: “They spit stars in my face when I open their shells.” Woven with
vulnerability, Veach’s poems move through haibuns, self-portraits, myths, and epistolaries,
asking us to look under our beds for the monsters and burying beetles within and around us.
—Jane Wong, author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything
SELF-PORTRAIT AS DAYTIME TELEVISION
It’s like the days sped away and now here I am
left with the memory of Morticia Addams twirling
her long black tresses. It’s as if I lost my baby brother
the day he toddled into the bee’s nest and not years later
after a hundred benders ruined his heart. It’s as if
the hours sped away and here I am left with the memory
of JFK—and me, weeping over pictures of Jackie in Look,
asking how she could marry Ari Onassis. It’s as if my
half-century of raising kids turned into one day and now
I’m left with the memory of the spearmint my mother
planted behind our house. It’s like some days got stuck—
here I am again, in the TV room, Dark Shadows
and the red wall-to-wall shag—while others snuck away.
It’s as if I lost the diary with the blue cover, the lock,
the key and now I’m left with the memory of my father
forever holding my brother, running across the lawn
shouting, “Start the car,” and the stupid way
the Three Stooges slapped each other silly Saturday
mornings in black-and-white.
Cindy Veach is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Monster Galaxy (MoonPath
Press), a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award; Her Kind (CavanKerry Press), an Eric Hoffer
Montaigne Medal finalist; and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the
Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book “Must Read.” Her poems have
appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, North American Review, Poet Lore,
and many other publications. Cindy received an MFA from the University of Oregon
where she was an assistant poetry editor for Northwest Review. She is Poetry editor of MER (Mom Egg Review).
After living on Boston’s North Shore (Cape Ann) for thirty years, Cindy
now resides in the Seattle area.
Visit Cindy's page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Cindy's collection from your favorite retailer:
