The issue includes my poem

“A Window (I have no eyes)”

Back in college in a poetry workshop class (early 90s) I wrote a series of poems using various ideas about windows. I revisited the collection fairly recently and did new versions of a few of the poems. 

Eyes are the windows of the soul, goes the old saw. I’ve played with that idea a few times. In “A Window (I have no eyes)” I was intrigued by the letter shapes (e looks like an eye, doesn’t it?, thus the word “eye” looks a bit like a face, an e (or eye) on either side of the y (which can be seen as nose-like, or like an elephant’s trunk?). I liked that eye and I and aye sound alike, that eyes and yes are such lookalikes, that the eye, our instrument for looking, cannot see itself. How much of that you’ll get from the poem, I can’t say. Much depends on whether you want to treat it as something with depth rather than something to glance at and move on. 

The poem was paired with a photo-scene & video by Andrea Letford. 

The photo next to my bio is a photo I took.

When the editors shared this to Instagram they also included audio of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds playing “Black Betty.”