Failure Strain, by Ralph James Savarese

Rubber Band Balls, by Tilly Woodward (USA) 2013

Failure Strain

How not to think of astral bodies?  
The smaller ball, moon to the larger;  
the larger without its sun,  
though clearly something illuminates both.  
  
It’s as if an office worker had become  
an astronaut and shot  
her own blue marble  
some 18,000 miles from the copier.  
  
She has perspective on her job  
and life, a kind of whole earth image,  
and an accompanying sense   
of weightlessness.  
  
If only wedding bands were made of rubber.  
If only her husband wouldn’t drink.  
In 1845 Englishman Stephen Perry  
patented this peculiar fastener.  
  
He’d seen his morning paper fall apart  
in wind: scattered stories  
full of woe, disassembling.  
“Keep it together,” he told himself.

Ralph James Savarese

Ralph James Savarese has published two books of prose, Reasonable People (Other Press) and See It Feelingly (Duke UP) and two collections of poetry, Republican Fathers (Nine Mile Books) and When This Is Over (Ice Cube Press). He has just finished a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry called Did We Make It? with the painter Tilly Woodward. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Tilly Woodward graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University of Kansas. She is Curator of Academic and Community Outreach at Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery, and Founding  Director of the Pella Community Art Center (1989-2007). Her work has been exhibited in more than 191 museums and galleries nationally and can be found in museum, corporate and private collections in Israel, Ghana, Uganda, India, and throughout the United States. Collections include the Addison Gallery of American Art, Des Moines Art Center, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Meredith Corporation, University of Iowa Museum of Art, West Publishing and Vermeer Manufacturing. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including two Fellowships for Drawing from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has initiated many arts outreach projects designed to help communities address specific social issues, foster creativity, build tolerance and compassion. She is well known for her highly realistic, meticulously detailed oil paintings.