STEVE KRONEN

Baby Daughter Half Asleep in a Swing The world, and what she makes of it, sprawling before her--the boisterous sky and earth. Weightless a moment, her arms and haunches thicken with centrifuge--back and forth she goes, the November sun lulling her who churned from her mother conscious-- wide-eyed and without sound (though coated with a Lethe ooze as if to forget the blurry sway of the world she'd chosen and pass from her mother without regret.) Galileo once clocked, by beats encoded in his wrist, a censer's swing. Mass and motion measured time. Worlds in his telescopes pulled on each other: starry valences of moons and planets wandering through space, all tethered by delicate balances at the far-swung ends of their unseen ropes. I know time and motion will wear in her face: Wallendas, the Hanged Man, the sagging Christ, Harold Lloyd dangling from a city clock, Jonathan Edwards' tenuous spider scribbling damnation in its fiery arc. All of it, even now, pounds in her wrist, the green world falling away from under.

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A poem by Sherod Santos

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A poem by Valerie Madamba