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Ellen Sander

 Ellen Sander    Ellen Sander, a lapsed rock journalist, is a cultural historian of the nineteen-sixties counterculture. An augmented edition of Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties, was recently reissued by Dover Publications. Chuck Klosterman told The N.Y. Times (7/18/2019) that it was on his nightstand. La-dee-fekking-dah, right?

She was the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine in 2013 and 2014. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including the Maine Review, the Georgia Review and Visiting Bob (Dylan). Hawthorne, a House in Bolinas, is published by Finishing Line Press. Her next poetry chapbook, Aquifer, will be published by Red Bird Chapbooks. You can easily find her website and social media droppings.

She hosts and produces, Poetry Woodshed Radio on WBFY-LP in Belfast, Maine. Poetry drop kicks her in the morning and undoes her curfew at night. She wishes frash were a word.

www.ellensander.com

 

 


 ►   Ellen Sander's microchap is available below. Download the single-page PDF by clicking the title & saving to your pc. Set your printer for 'landscape' printing. Folding instructions are under the Who We Are menu tab.

 

Origami Microchap

Terrain

 

Click title to download PDF microchap

 

Ellen Sander CVR Terrain 2021 May 

Cover collage by Jan Keough

• 

Wisteria and Stars

By day, wisteria presses
against wire latticed glass
a resting place
for soot and expired moths

At night, shadows slide
down the fluorescent road
silhouettes loiter in a soft charade

Desire and liquor
feed one another
A starless sky pulsates neon stitches

Blinking Orion, stammering Cassiopeia
throb behind thick-breathed curtains

But stars, no matter what they’re called
have no names
and do not answer

 

Hoofprints

These hoofprints
must lead to horses
wild ones, their manes
like wind,
who stop and
let me on
take me to forests for
rest and water

They are not the shod prints
of farm horses after a
sneak escape, when
the teenager leaves the gate
just a little bit open, then
Pappoús remembers the
thicket of nettles,
finds them browsing
spiny purple pods and
leads them home

 

sheltering bar

a storm soiled wave, on the pain
of the shore
losing its limbs in the sand

the wave’s tiny crawl back
to the liminal edge it rakes
and claws back to the well
on aches of foam

breaking in sighs on the
sheltering bar, rise, swells
breaking again on the sheltering bar

The space between us

is shaped like a melon
warm like a fieldstone
full as a river making a groove

in the stone and the clay
we are made of.

(for my husband, John)

 

Water as Well

A street dancer
in Barcelona
clatters on strumming,
hair pulled back

Voltage dark eyes
a memory of
yearning to
dance around a fire

In that memory
a river ran clean enough to drink
the frontier between living
and dead was fungible

She flanked her skirt
only once, it was the only
moment remembered
All is water, all is well

the quiet conflict
between resignation
and resistance aroused

I love water as rain
water as stream
water as faucet
water as tears
and I love water
as well

Ellen Sander © 2021