"Out of Reach" by Amanda Pomeroy
Stargazing by Geoff Anderson
We didn’t have constellations
on fifth street. The stars scattered
before we counted to ten and hid
behind streetlights. The only lines
we crossed were buses. A belt held
up uniforms. Cancer took grandma’s lung
the night we saw our first shooting star,
a meteor running down heaven’s
stockings until there was nothing
left to burn in the windshield, the engine
churning softer than a sewing machine
while the night patched the sky with a spool
of black thread so fast, no matter how hard
we looked, we couldn’t find the seams.
on fifth street. The stars scattered
before we counted to ten and hid
behind streetlights. The only lines
we crossed were buses. A belt held
up uniforms. Cancer took grandma’s lung
the night we saw our first shooting star,
a meteor running down heaven’s
stockings until there was nothing
left to burn in the windshield, the engine
churning softer than a sewing machine
while the night patched the sky with a spool
of black thread so fast, no matter how hard
we looked, we couldn’t find the seams.
Geoff Anderson teaches foreigners how to play the queen's English in Columbus, OH. His work is forthcoming or appears in Outlook Springs, Wherewithal, and Red Eft Review, among others.
Amanda Pomeroy is a self-taught artist, a lover of life and beauty, and a connoisseur of all things unconventional. She is currently spending her days on a start-up business in Hoquiam, WA; an art gallery called Renegade Red, which is scheduled to open in the Spring of 2017. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Environment and Society at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where she lived for 15 years before returning to her home in Washington state in 2014. Biology and Environmental Science have always been a passion for her, and she hopes to one day incorporate her love of science into art. Two of her paintings hint at this aspiration, featuring bees alongside women, as an intimation of the crisis surrounding bee populations and the direct correlation to humans, both in cause and consequence. She believes, with conviction, that humans are symbiotes of the Earth, and that, individually, we hold no more grandeur than the tiny bee; albeit, just as essential.
