Poem published in Birmingham Arts Journal, Vol. 8 Issue 4

         



                                                              ICE SKATER
                                                                      Betty Spence




                                                              Always be like water
                                                              resounding in his ears,
                                                              fluid moves give a river
                                                              as breakable as bone
                                                              back its ebb and flow.


                                                              Silver-booted blades
                                                              scratch winter tracings
                                                              as fabulous as fishes caught
                                                              on alder limbs dropped into
                                                              holes in Walden's Pond

                                                               iced-over with magic panes.

              * Read Birmingham Arts Journal, online at www.birminghamartsjournal.org. 
                         Editor: Jim Reed...Poetry Editor: Irene Latham...Art Editor: Liz Reed...
                         Production Editor: Kathy Jolley 


                                                             

     Also published in Winter, 2011/2012 was the following poem.

                                      School Children View the Body
                                       Of an 11 Year Old Gang Member

                                
                                                       The picture in the paper
                                                        shows them looking sideways
                                                        into the casket, mothers hovering.
                                                      
                                                        Robert, better known as Yummy,
                                                        (he could live on animal crackers)
                                                        was to start sixth grade in the fall.
   
                                                        To find the hidden picture
                                                         look for a boy putting his tousled head
                                                         in the lion's mouth.                 
                                                                            BS
                                                       
                                                         * Lora Zill is editor of TOS

Time of Singing, Winter 2011/2012

        "Eighty-Something" took second place in Time of Singing               Winter 2011/2012 Contest, "It's a Wonderful Life." 
          
                                         Eighty-Something
                                                             After "coming into Eighty" by May Sarton

                            
                               I think I shall live to be eighty-something--
                     I've seen how loath old poets are to leave.
                     Stick-figures in wind-puffed sleeves
                     staring down an ocean of words unsaid,
                     languishing for want of naming things
                     to others and themselves.

                     I've seen them piping like shore birds
                     on finding half-buried in the sand
                     a bottle thrown into a river at flood stage,
                     a bottle, for all I know, bearing the words:
                     Write the vision, and make it plain.

                     For all the times time has hurried me
                     I think I shall live to worry time along.
                     Already half-past the wakefulness of noon,
                     I'd like to live to sleep-in, sleep-off poems,
                     live until lines in my face story forth,

                     live long enough to give away whatever
                     to whomever I please and be the richer for it.
                     I'll say goodbye but once--and that at the gate.
                     You can, if you like, watch me out of sight.   
                                                                                        --BS

Harp-Strings Poetry Journal

New publication: Harp-Strings Poetry, Winter 2012.  
Editor: Madelyn Eastlund

Home from peddling turnip greens,

Daddy poured it out like small worries

on the kitchen floor.  Mama, who could

all but see germs passed from hand to hand,

wouldn't have it any other way.

That she never took a shine

two what we children were so taken by

had something to do with always having to

count it out to somebody else.

But me and my brothers... I wish

you could have seen us in the money...

coin striking coin, coins rolling

like runaway wheels across fields

of green and brown linoleum.

You would have thought us proper tellers

the way we stacked together what goes together

--pennies, nickels,quarters, dimes... 

We knew all along the silver,

as Daddy called it, was not ours to keep.

Ours was the feel of it, round and smooth,

the weight of it heavy in the palm of your hand.

Ours was to count it and to know great sums.

And having this, we were content

to wrap it in little banker's sleeves

that tell (in part) what it all comes to.

                              --Betty Spence

"In the Money" received first place in the 1997

National Federation of State Poetry Societies

Founders Award category and was pulblished

in NFSPS' 1997 Encore.