Art: from Transitory Space, Nova Scotia, Canada, Tree Color Field #16 by Lean Oates
Entre Nous
We had long sought escape
among the multicolored lights
of the inked city,
in the understory of the unpaginated woods.
But it wasn’t meant to be,
no matter how often
we read Proust late into the night.
My bon ami, we were never much of a talker,
even when those mornings
in Marseille turned balmy.
We were a rather simple machine
putting together strings of words.
We were always just ourselves.
Rope-a-Dope
We could feel someone
thumbing through our pages.
Our life as a book was a slim thing
though we came unabridged.
They thought they could get the better of us,
kick us to the curb once they were done.
They presumed words were words.
But our typeface, sans-serif,
was meant to beguile,
to lure them in so close our world
would encompass them and never die.
Take Physic, Pomp
We told them to remember the Neolithic head
was taken, at first glance,
for that of a doll’s, high in the Tyrol.
A small circle of skull exposed
between the black-edged lips of a split scalp.
After five thousand years
of continuous winter,
the body sunned in the balmy winds
of the foehn blowing in from North Africa.
We said you should consider
that weekenders pilfered his genitalia
before he was brain-scanned
and scrutinized under klieg lights.
We advised them to see
in this shriveled predecessor
the flower of their future
made marcescent in no man’s land.
About the author:
Todd Copeland’s poems have appeared in The Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, California Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, and Columbia Poetry Review, and his essays have been published in Literary Imagination, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, and Media, War & Conflict, among other publications. He holds degrees in English from Baylor University (BA), The University of Georgia (MA), and Texas A&M University (PhD). A native of Ohio, he lives in Waco, Texas.
In the artist’s words:
Lean Oates. I recently had a solo and several group shows in Toronto 2019 at Black Cat Artspace and recently had additional group shows in Toronto at the Gladstone Hotel, John. Aird Gallery, Connections Gallery, Propeller Gallery, Arta Gallery and at the Papermill Gallery.
I’ve had solo shows at venues such as Susan Eley Fine Art, The Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, The Brooklyn Public Library, The Center for Book Arts, Tomasulo Gallery, Real Art Ways, and at the Sol Mednick Gallery at the Philadelphia University of the Arts and national and international solo shows at Anchor Graphics, Artemisia Gallery and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Illinois and at Galerie Joella in Turku, Finland.
My work has been in group shows in NY City and state at the Schweinfurth Art Center, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Nurture Art Gallery, Metaphor Contemporary Art, Denise Bibro Fine Art, Yale University, The Pen and Brush and at The Center for Book Arts and nationally at Bob Rauschenberg Gallery in Florida, Unsettled Gallery in New Mexico, The Southeast Center for Photography in South Carolina and at Nave Gallery in Massachusetts.