Surveillance, by Marjorie Maddox

Confused Movements, by Anna Lee Hafer (USA) 2024

Surveillance
 
Every night the clock keeps ticking.
Hear its whispers wrapped in shouts.
Not much light to see the hidden:
shadows turned inside and out.
 
Every day the colors changing:
buildings turned inside and out.
"Do you trust me?" someone's asking.
Try to paint the shape of doubt.
 
By the window, something's growing.
In her books it's all spelled out.
Feed the flowers and the paintings.
Nothing here can go without
 
others selves that keep on reaching
for the doors named In and Out
where the neighbours, while they're sleeping,
sometimes whisper, sometimes shout
 
in a language that you're hearing
in the book you've just pulled out
from the shelves you are rebuilding
in your life of trust, not doubt.
 
Marjorie Maddox

Poetry Moment host for WPSU-FM, assistant editor of Presence, and Professor Emerita at Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published over 20 books—most recently the poetry collections Hover Here, Seeing Things, and Small Earthly Space—as well as a story collection, five  children’s books, and the anthologies Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and Keystone Poetry (co-editor). Her narrative biography is A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball’s Great Experiment (ages 10—adult), about her great granduncle, Branch Rickey, who helped sign Jackie Robinson to Major League Baseball. www.marjoriemaddox.com

Anna Lee Hafer is a studio artist in the Philadelphia area who graduated from Roberts Wesleyan College, Rochester, New York, in 2019. Her work has shown across Pennsylvania and New York: Wayne Art Center, The Bellefonte Art Museum, the Gmeiner Art and Cultural Center, the Lycoming Arts Gallery, the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, the MacFadden Gallery (Finger Lakes Art Series). In the Wayne Art Center’s 2023 Fall Members juried exhibition, her painting Wild Rest received honourable mention from Philadelphia-area award-winning artists Roger Chavez and Diane Collins. She has published book covers for Seeing Things (Wildhouse) and In the Museum of My Daughter's Mind (Shanti Arts), and has published images or broadsides in numerous journals. For additional information, please visit www.hafer.work.