Poetry – Issue 1 | November 2008
Four Poems by Sue Standing
Camino (Santiago de Chile)
Oro es sudor del sol
Plata es lagrimas de la luna
Gold is sweat of the sun,
silver is tears of the moon,
born from celestial dust,
sired from the eye
of an immense body
of heat and lust.
At Fever River,
a tiny sliver
of myth can make the world whole.
Shamans ingest mushrooms called
hijo de agua – waterchild –
to see the workings of the soul.
When I check my e-mail
at Café Virtual,
streams of digits turn into a word.
In the universe out there,
you could be anywhere
from invisible to disappeared.
About the author
Sue Standing, featured poet in Issue 1, permanently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but travels as much as she can. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize for her short story, “Fast Sunday,” grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute, and is currently on a Fulbright Research Scholarship at the University of Toulouse in France. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines, including Agni, The American Poetry Review, American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Southwest Review. Her poems appear in several anthologies, including Conversation Pieces: Poems that Talk to Other Poems, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, and The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper. She teaches creative writing and African literature at Wheaton College, in Norton, Massachusetts. Her most recent collection of poems is False Horizon (Four Way Books, 2003).
