Lois Bender
Water-Maned Mare
opus, opus, opus,
they’ll type up
an obituary to have
a headline in your name;
your age,
the size of your arms
(from fingertip to
dark mountain range
of a collarbone)
when you flung them
across the sun and
made your body
your white whale,
your family’s ancestry
(“: obscure. Her blood is”
burning), the white of your
teeth biting into blotting
paper, pulling so wide against
the night that your luminescence
almost touched me,
the crater you created
in your bedroom floor,
Jolly-Rancher wrappers
littering your cosmic shrapnel
in the wake of you—
you, everywhere,
my water-maned mare.
Anushka Roy is a high-school student from New Delhi, who founded and served as the editor-in-chief at her school’s literary magazine. She’s a visual artist and writer, and has spent the last year investigating trends in the representation of emotional chaos in modern art. She has previously been published in The Aurora Journal, among others,and is a content creator at Political Pandora.
Lois Bender, a long time New Yorker, combines her background in art direction and graphic design with personal expression in drawing, watercolor, photography, and printmaking creating a fresh synthesis of styles. Her art illustration brand GardenSpiritsNY Designs grew out of her Retail Gift Industry experience and her love of nature. Bender’s art practice has explored nature themes in gardens at residencies in France and The Hamptons, NY, as well as at Skowhegan and the Women’s Studio Workshop. With a B.A. from Hunter College, NY and an MFA from Boston University, she teaches art and watercolor techniques and exhibits her work in the Metro NY area. She is an Art Professor at Essex County College in Newark, NJ and has an art studio in Manhattan. She is an urban and garden sketcher who celebrates nature in all its poetic and ephemeral expressions.