Poem of the Week--To Be Fearless, Ryan Mattern

We owe Ryan Mattern, one of our all-time favorite contributors, an apology, because in his acceptance email we told him the latest his poem would run would be the first week in January. OOPS! Still, he's a good guy, so we hope he'll forgive us. He was one of the first people to submit to us and we remember he was so excited when he got in that he was telling people in the elevators at Columbia all about this great new mag that had taken his work. Since then he has been our of our stalwart champion, leaving Toucans all over California and encouraging his fellow writers to submit to us. Check out Ryan's works in Issue 2,4 and 6, and you may be surprised to find out that he's a top-notch fiction writer--poetry's a heterofore unseen direction for him.

And speaking of heretofore unseen and reading people's work, it suddenly got a whole lot easier. In the most excrutiatingly boring experience of Editrice Liz's life, she recently went back and added Tables of Contents, complete with easy links, to all of the issues prior to Issue 9.  Now all you have to do in order to read past issues is click on the previous issue, and the TOC should be the first or second post that shows up, and the links should deliver you right to whatever peeks your interest. You'd better appreciate it--we do it all for you. Thank you to the always-glowing reviewer Owl Who Laughs for first suggesting this innovation in the first place. We really wish we had a time machine and had made our past incarnations do this for us.

If you're really observant, you might also notice something else new to the blog, but don't click on it until we tell you, as we want to make sure it works before we deprive you of your fortunes. Now, without further ado, the long-awaited Poem of the Week.

To Be Fearless

by Ryan Mattern

Is there a reason why we choose the cold
As our common ground?
Do we find warmth in each other?
This seems impossible, as we make a point
Of being too shy to touch.
Though, eventually our molecules give in
And I will reset a lock of your hair,
Your embrace will linger before “goodnight”.
How long before we are fearless?
Will we ever be unafraid————
To get our hands sticky, to stain our shirts
————Long enough to insert our fingers
Into this fruit, remove the rind and
Taste what we’ve grown?
We are farmers in a farm town
Terrified of a blue-ribbon crop.
We are water in a frozen pond.
The Winter dreaming of what it would be like
To be Summer.