Lois P. Jones is a finalist in the annual Mslexia Poetry Competition judged by Helen Mort and will be published in Spring 2023. She is the winner of the 2023 Alpine Fellowship which this year takes place in Fjällnäs, Sweden. In 2022 her work was a finalist for both the Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry from Orison Books and the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. Other honors include a Highly Commended and publication in the 2021 Bridport Poetry Prize Anthology Jones awards include the Bristol Poetry Prize, the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a single poem, the Tiferet Poetry Prize and winning finalist for the Terrain Poetry contest judged by Jane Hirshfield. In collaboration with filmmaker Jutta Pryor and sound designer Peter Verwimp, her poem La Scapigliata won the 2022 Lyra Bristol Poetry Film Competition. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets - Poem A Day, Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Plume, Guernica Editions, Terrain, Vallentine Mitchell of London; Verse Daily, Narrative and others. Jones’ first collection, “Night Ladder,” was published by Glass Lyre Press and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award and the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a poetry collection. Since 2007 Jones has hosted KPFK’s Poets Café, and acted as poetry editor for the Pushcart prize-winning Kyoto Journal. She is a screening judge for Claremont University’s Kingsley-Tufts Awards.

Frida’s Glove, Chateau Muzot, Summer 1922

The poet … Rilke enjoyed donning his maid’s suede gloves and dusting … furniture in the wee hours of the morning like caressing the body of a lover. “After this,” he said, “there’s nothing that you do not know!’ ~ The Poetics of Space, Bachelard

There was a candle burning inside my brow. I could not pinch its flame, so I crept out of the fevered bed to the forest of our floors and their cool green against my feet. Then a shadow near the window. Just a hand at first- moving up the velvet drapes, independent as a whistle from nowhere. A thin figure of a man emerged slightly from this stage, fingers and thumb gliding up the drape’s edge. Something at the wrist. A thickness between the fingers, like a new skin, a fourchette with a slight webbing which layered the delicate hand. My suede glove touched the tieback then moved slowly up the plaited cord, then down. One finger drew the line of its own profile from forehead to neck and I felt as if he
traced my own throat, down to the clavicle then up again to the edge of my left lobe. I shivered. The moon shook too, so sewn to the poet’s mind, that the fabric of our scene tilted, then buried itself in the night’s seam.

Lois P. Jones

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William O’Daly has translated eight books of the late-career and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda and most recently Neruda’s first volume, Book of Twilight, a finalist for the 2018 Northern California Book Award in Translation. O’Daly’s chapbooks of poems include The Whale in the Web, The Road to Isla Negra, Water Ways (a collaboration with JS Graustein), and Yarrow and Smoke. His first full length volume of poems, The New Gods, was published by Beltway Editions in September 2022. In March 2023, the Los Angeles Master Chorale included three poems from The New Gods and one from Waterways in the world premiere of Reena Esmail’s “Malhaar: A Requiem for Water,” at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry and in September 2021 received the American Literary Award from the bilingual Korean American journal Miju Poetry and Poetics. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and co-founder of Copper Canyon Press, his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have been published in numerous journals and as part of multimedia exhibits and performances. He has received national and regional honors for literary editing and instructional design and served on the national board of Poets Against War. Currently, he is Lead Writer for the California Water Plan, the state’s strategic plan for sustainably and equitably managing water resources.

Love in a Changing Climate

Touching your absent hand, I am like the saint
who wanders with the first yellow leaf,
the ease of what might be mistaken
for our familiar love. It’s never easy
to sustain in the eyes what changes inside,
to feel the fear, the abandonment, and shame.
Listen . . . the wind is scattering our names. We are
the question the stone and the river ask.

Had I been with you when you died, I’d know
him who knows how to shepherd the dying home.
Illiterate birds ravel our lives with twelve strings
and we find love that takes the leap with us,
stays to clean up the birth of the cosmos,
the benevolent trees that burn like us.

William O’Daly