by Cynthia Yatchman
An Ekphrastic of Before & After Cervical Spine Disc Replacement Surgery X-Rays
~for Cynthia Neely
1
Beneath
what hollows
into a saddle,
there is a ladder
that folds
into an attic of teeth
and below—
a broken
staircase
of bone
worn
stone.
2
A church spire.
Its belfry—
a hive where
the queen courts
her little drones.
And in the steeple,
there is a door
for water and light
and the odd rabbit
that escaped
the dewy grass
to hop the stairs
straight up
and back
again.
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and author of the award-winning collection Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, 2019) and two chapbooks. Since Heidi started writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies such as American Poetry Journal, Frontier, Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review, and Tar River. She recently received her MFA in Poetry from NYU. www.heidiseabornpoet.com.
Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle based artist and art instructor. With an M.A. in child development and a B. A. in education, she has a strong interest in art education and teaches art to adults, children and families. A former ceramicist, she studied with J.T. Abernathy in Ann Arbor, MI. After receiving her B.F.A. in painting from the University of Washington she changed to 2D work and has stayed there since, working primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections and has been shown nationally in California, Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Oregon and Wyoming. She has exhibited extensively in the Northwest, including shows at Seattle University, Seattle PaciNic University, Shoreline Community College, the Tacoma and Seattle Convention Centers and the PaciNic Science Center.