by Joseph A. Miller
The Maple has Returned to its Winter
Its branches, a series of wishbones,
birdless.
People of this city understand
this seasonal coma.
But not the girl. She stands transfixed.
The power of obsession is the power to exclude.
Stare at a spot long enough
and the world drops into peripheral abyss.
How easy to erase the hieroglyphic of rabbit tracks,
or ignore a lost blue glove
that forgets the shape
of the hand that filled it.
She pities the branches with their lost leaves.
She pities the grey bark,
its rough edges curled to meet the wind.
But most of all, she pities the tree’s nakedness.
Last night, under a man who pounded away at their separateness,
the girl recalled fragments of undersong.
Something about a green shawl, fringes dangling from satin
in single provocative threads and pink flowers
(pansies, perhaps), fashioned by a hand
with two fingers missing.
Absence has its own melody.
It led her
to this exact spot. To this tree.
Begin here.
Babo Kamel splits her time between Raleigh, North Carolina and Montreal, Quebec. Her work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, CV2, Poet Lore, and Best Canadian Poetry 2020 among others. She is a Best of Net nominee, and a six-time Pushcart nominee. Her chapbook, After, is published with Finishing Line Press. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson’s Program For Writers. Her book, What The Days Wanted is published with Broadstone Books. Find her at babokamel.com.
Joseph A. Miller is an Associate Professor of Art at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo State, where he has taught drawing and painting since 1997. He earned a B.F.A. degree from Kutztown University, Pennsylvania in 1990 and an M.F.A. degree in painting and drawing from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 1993. Before being offered the teaching position at Buffalo State College Joseph worked at The Philadelphia Museum of Art in both the security and art conservation departments. Miller’s work is in numerous public and private collections, and has been shown internationally in Finland, China, Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as across the United States, from Berkeley, California to Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has been exhibited at the Arnot Art Museum, the Castellani Art Museum and the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in New York, the Allentown Art Museum, the Woodmere Art Museum, the Erie Art Museum in Pennsylvania, and the Springville Museum of Art in Utah. He has earned numerous awards, including a First Place Award in A.D. Gallery’s Art in Times of Anxiety National Exhibition, at Pembroke, NC, a Purchase Award and a People’s Choice Award at the Royal Nebeker Gallery, in Clatsop Community College’s, Au Naturel: The Nude in The 21st Century International Exhibition, in Astoria Oregon, a First Place Award in Manifest Creative Research Gallery’s International Drawing Annual V, in Cincinnati Ohio, a Best in Show Award in the National Drawing and Painting Exhibition at the Lore Degenstein Gallery at Susquehanna University, Pennsylvania, and two Purchase Awards from Wright State University Art Galleries in Dayton, Ohio. Joseph has given lectures about his work at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Daemen College, New York, Southern Utah University, The University of Utah, Utah State University and at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York. His work is represented by the Art Dialogue Gallery in Buffalo, NY, Meibohm Fine Art in East Arora, NY and the West End Gallery in Corning, NY.