Featured Reader
Virtual Event on November 12th, 2024–6:00 P.M to 8:00 P.M.
Live stream will be available on our YouTube Channel at the time of the event!
Lisa Rosenberg
Lisa Rosenberg is the author of A Different Physics (Red Mountain Press), winner of the 2024 American Legacy Book Award for Poetry. A former space program engineer trained as a physicist, her work has been recognized by a Djerassi Leonardo/ISAST Residency, Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and MOSAIC America Fellowship. She served as the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California, and is a frequent speaker on the confluence of arts and sciences. Her poems, multidisciplinary essays, and satire appear in venues such as The Threepenny Review, The Common, Plume, Terrain.org, POETRY, SWWIM, Slackjaw, and California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is a longtime part-time resident of Ilia, Greece.
Is a Rose
O’Keefe’s
opens in the troposphere, blooms like smoke. Echo to galaxies it most resembles, inviting the eye with no flicker of doubt or flagrant hue. Only the lone spiral of everywhere. Only the wordless cue set loose on the universe. Poor you at the center. Poor you adrift—here, here, here, here. No way to spy from a distance.
Shakespeare’s
AKA: Thirty-leaf; aphid estate; attribute of saints; emblem of battles and crowns; quasi-fictitious wartime riveter; Peace.
Feynman’s
unfurls inward, outward, n-ward, along the adding-to-not-subtracting tributaries of implicit awe. Formal, familial, cellular, subatomic. Consistent with extraordinary fact and raw meandering. Marvelous through and through; as in between as fractal leafings-out. Dispassionate, bereft of counterparts. Inciting verve alone and in abundance.
Piaf’s
reigns adjectival, lilting, bent on the chambered heart and celluloid likenesses. Maybe a dance—measured yet bold, styled yet timeless. Maybe a question, a destination. Remade, redolent, redux and revived: the unbeatable, whirling allure. Mon fleur, qui bat?
Lisa Rosenberg
published in Plume (Oct. 2024)
Citrus
By which I mean the blossom, not the fruit.
By which I mean the scent and not the sight.
By which I mean nostalgia, its sudden bite.
As if a tree, a patio, a street.
The way the concrete had a fragrance.
The concrete and the asphalt and the quiet, tiny yards.
Because the windows and the curtains.
Because the timbre of a passing car.
And how the dampness of the grass
in which I meant to pause.
Or when the stippled light on stucco walls.
Because a slow forgetting.
By which I mean the acrid with the sweet.
Lisa Rosenberg
Published in SWWIM (May, 2024)