Every night he slipped the story on
like a second self, like a silk chemise his wife
once wore, like sepals overlapped around a bud,
like new bark on green skin, like a boy
in love with flowers— so naturally did it fit.
In the morning, the dream unraveled. It unspooled
and ran like water. His mind could not retrieve one pebble.
…..…
The sun blew over him. He felt a chill.
Like a re-run of a classic. Someone had sold out,
was being hunted down, was running through the streets
of an old city, hopping a tram in the nick
of time, traveling backward, changing into something
more comfortable—the body of a girl, who fled
into the same irresistible sorrow, night after night.
Constance Rowell Mastores (1938— ) was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley. She has graduate degrees in Comparative Literature from UC-Berkeley. She is a classicist by inclination and a modernist by choice. She and her husband, Kent “Nick” Mastores, live in Oakland, California. On her own poetry, she has this to say, “Rarely do I set out to write a 14 liner. Over the years, however, I have noticed that the poems I write that do result in 14 liners are preceded by a flow of sound— and sometimes a slight tingling in my fingers. The next stage is a fusion of emotion and idea set to some sort of rhythmical pattern. The words themselves may be born of depression; or of a keen observation of something in nature that has deeply moved me. In all cases, when I realize that I have resolved what I have to say in fourteen lines, I am incredibly happy.” Constance’s poetry appears in Paws & Tales, an anthology of poetry about animals, and A Deep But Dazzling Darkness, a book of selected poems, to be published by Blue Light Press in 2013; and in journals such as The Atlanta Review, Blue Unicorn, Chronicles, The Comstock Review, Correspondences, The Deronda Review, The Eclectic Muse, The Lyric, The Magnolia Quarterly, Many Mountains Moving, Nimrod, The Neovictorian/Cochlea, Rattapallax and Visions International.
This sonnet is pre-published with the permission of the Editor-in-chief from: Richard Vallance, The Phoenix Rising from the Ashes: Anthology of sonnets of the early third millennium = Le Phénix renaissant de ses cendres : Anthologie de sonnets au début du troisième millénaire. Friesen Presse, Victoria, B.C., Canada. © 2013. approx. 240 pp. ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-4602-1700-9 Price: $28.00 Paperback: 978-1-4602-1701-6 Price: $18.00 e-Book: 978-1-4602-1702-3 Price: TBA
300 sonnets & ghazals in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese & Persian. 30 sonnets in this anthology are to be pre-published by our permission in Poetry Life & Times (UK) which has exclusive sole rights prior to the publication of the anthology itself. Readers may also contact Richard Vallance, Editor-in-Chief, at: http://vallance22.hpage.com/ for further information.
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