Bio

Lois Elaine Heckman grew up in Los Angeles, receiving a degree in Italian from UCLA. She has lived for many years as an expat in Milan, Italy, becoming a volunteer nurse and first aid instructor for the Italian Red Cross. Her works have appeared previously in The Fib Review, and among her other credits are Boston Literary Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, Bent Ear Review, Tilt-a-Whirl, The Sonnet Scroll, Persimmon Tree and Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She won the 2010 New England Shakespeare Festival Rubber Ducky Sonnet Contest, and has placed in various international competitions, including Poetry on the Lake in 2012 and 2013, and the Hungry Hill Poetry Prize in 2012. Her chapbook, "Out of Nowhere" (White Violet Press), was published by Kelsay Books in 2013.

Strumming teased by the stroke of those fingers, as if they
were coaxing guitar strings to steal
new music from a
hollowness
hiding
in
my
empty
body, I
was led into flights
of reverberating refrains,
swirling cloud ballet emotions, as ephemeral
as pleasure, dissolving into
cruel symphonies in
fantasy
that fooled
hope.
My
feelings
slipped back to
insentience when
your hands vanished into pocket
darkness, buried in the closet of my memories.