Liz Dolan
Under A Cloud of Unknowing
we baked dark bread with seeded crusts
and pitted silky black olives
We hoped for good fortune
to be good people believed the spirea
sprouted a thousand live spiders
We busied ourselves wetting the lips of the leper
teaching the ignorant not knowing we were the ignorant
dervishes whirling in a sea of meaningless doing
our lives leaching.
Still we listened to the old woman
ice skating on a roast's rib bones tied to her boots with waxed twine,
to the crook-back man biking o'er the waves
Did we really see him?
We sought a pure life by the sea whose haughty white manes
galloped to the shore washing our footprints away
without a trace.
Bio
Liz Dolan's poetry manuscript, A Secret of Long Life, nominated for a Pushcart, has been published by Cave Moon Press. Her first poetry collection, They Abide, nominated for The McGovern Prize, Ashland University, was published by March Street. An eight-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Best of the Web, she was a finalist for Best of the Net 2014. She won The Nassau Prize for Nonfiction, 2011 and the same prize for fiction, 2015. She has received fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, The Atlantic Center for the Arts and Martha's Vineyard.