Sorry about the crack in the wall of the kitchen,
said the formal women at the closing, signing over
their cared-for Foursquare
to me, shaky single mother, scraping my feet on their mat,
Pigpen on Adderall. Dear god, the polish of this place.
Not even dust on the tops of tall things.
Then in the closet of the bedroom, on the shelf,
a bullet. Size of a newborn mouse.
I have no one. I show it to my sons, the wildebeests.
They open throttle. All I know of gunpowder
is from Looney Tunes. The elder begs to slam it
with a hammer. The fight erupts
over if and how it will explode.
NANCY KANGAS is a poet, teaching artist and animator based in Columbus, Ohio. She has poetry in books and journals including East Bay Review, Forklift, Ohio, and Rattle. She is the co-director of Preschool Poets: An Animated Film Series, which features poems composed by her students, and is at work on a short documentary film about crying.
JULIET MARTIN is an interdisciplinary artist working with handmade textile and digital media. Her work incorporates handspun and hand-dyed fibers woven with illustrations printed on fabric. In 2012 she discovered weaving on a Japanese loom and the Saori school of philosophy that insists “there are no mistakes.” By embracing that free-form process, what might be considered “mistakes” in traditional weaving encourages unique experimentation. She uses the improvisational nature of this kind of weaving to escape restrictions and rules. She challenges the function of the fiber medium. Her process focuses on aesthetics instead of rules. She cuts up and puts back together her weavings, taking something precious and recontextualizing it. By adding drawings to the weavings, a door is opened. Each illustration becomes a legend to the tapestries, refining the message of each piece. Unifying the weaving and the drawing results in a unique combination of emotion and representation.
