Molly M. Caldwell
is a Maine Native and a recent graduate from College of The Atlantic. She works seasonally in Bar Harbor and spends her free time traveling and writing. Her work has been published in COA magazine.
Michael Biehl
his poetry has appeared in Image, Callaloo, Prairie Fire, and Grain Magazine, among other journals. New work is forthcoming in the Texas Review and Hiram Poetry Review. He works as an ESL instructor to foreign university students and business executives, and is also a freelance copy editor.
Sarah Anderson
is a poet and high school English teacher. Her poems have appeared in The 2008 Poets Guide to New Hampshire, Currents V: Seacoast Writers Association Journal, and The Oakland Review. She earned her MFA in poetry at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She recently started a reading series called The Silo Series in her new venue, The Word Barn, a place for writers to come together for both readings and writing workshops.
Black
by Philip Dacey
“My mother never let me wear black;
now I wear black all the time.”
Overheard remark
Some people dream in color,
others in black–and–white.
I dream in black;
I want to be a night sky without stars.
Each of my senses can apprehend blackness.
If black is the absence of all color
and white the presence of all color,
I want to be drained of the rainbow.
The void is black, and reigns.
If black were a tongue, it would say
in an instant, like a bolt of black lightning,
everything that is. Those in exile,
either distantly or within
themselves, wear black
because the heart does.
A candle in the darkness
profanes your truest self.
Blow it out. You’re a tunnel
with no light at either end,
and color’s a sentimentality, a lie.
The connoisseur of black
knows it comes in shades —
black, blacker, blackest.
Give back everything
to black.