Ghost Girl in the Recovery Room
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She points past the empty field
past the ringing of a church bell She asks who rings the church bell I tell her no one now The silverware needs shining in the game she’s making up She tells me she is an empty treehouse & I am a moon pool but she’s the architect of my scarred abdomen she’s set for tea It’s an ordinary weekday The sound of bells on rocks or rocks for bells she says your mother won the heaven lottery & had a beautiful daughter I remember saying something like this to her but she’s soaked it in as milk to bread & repeats the beautiful empty of my abdomen She scars the moon pool I am a church bell I empty past the field past the ringing of play I remember a table It’s an ordinary weekday The silverware needs shining |
Ze Gao. From Halcyon Series. Photograph Courtesy of the artist.
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Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. Her debut poetry collection, Landscape with Headless Mama, won the 2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize, and her second poetry collection, Protection Spell, has won inclusion in the Miller Williams Poetry Series, chosen by Billy Collins, and will be published in February 2017 with The University of Arkansas Press. She is also the author of three poetry chapbooks, Curanderisma (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2016), The Daughter’s Curse (ELJ, forthcoming 2017), and Lifeline (Glass Poetry Press, forthcoming 2017). Her honors include an National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, The Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, The 2015 Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best of the Net 2015, Best New Poets 2013, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, and Southern Humanities Review (where she was a finalist for the 2015 Auburn Witness Prize). She is Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal and teaches online workshops at The Poetry Barn.
Ze Gao was born in China in 1992. He is a photographer, painter, curator, national senior photographer, and makeup artist in China. He studied fine arts at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and obtained an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He was also admitted into the Professional Teaching Materials for Students of Photography in Higher Education Institutions in China. His works have been showcased in many exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Korea, Singapore, and China.