Ruth Ellen Kocher

M/mediation I Dominance The once has never said a word Nor has the next day stammered promise To you the black bird calls a message across The pine. To you the creek is in a rush Pity first the sky spread so thin Pity next the water bottle crushed at the road’s edge Discard can never diminish its grip on what becomes What becomes cannot stop fighting what was Drink the reservoir in an untapped gulp Breathe the carbon breath of freeways Forget that within you a knife rages Forget the red storm of wanting to be           M/mediation II Submission -- for W.S.W. what happens when there happens to be literally   a silver lining to the cloud: he says ... the sky is beautiful ... you say ... yes the cloud is lined silver he says ... no really. you say ... yes. it is so. everything now defeated couched against the forever loveliness of ever after. but if it comes how unseemly how cliche. how awful the art of real and pathetic happiness. a poem about happiness cannot succeed. a poem about happiness makes you search your gut for the last raw pang       - - - - - -

Ruth Ellen Kocher 's work has been published in Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Ploughshares, African American Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Washington Square Journal, Crab Orchard Review, ninth letter, as well as other literary journals, and has been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She'r. Her first book of poetry, Desdemona's Fire, won the Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets and was published by Lotus Press in 1999. Her second book, When the Moon Knows You're Wandering (2002), won the Green Rose Prose and was published by Western Michigan and New Issues Poetry and Prose in 2001, who also published her third book, One Girl Babylon. She has been a fellow at the Bucknell Seminar, the Cave Canem Workshop, and Yaddo. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.