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 Shot Glass Journal, and among her other credits are Boston Literary Magazine, The Fib Review, Tilt-a-Whirl, Prole, The Sonnet Scroll at the Poetry Porch, Persimmon Tree and Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She won the 2010 New England Shakespeare Festival Rubber Ducky Sonnet Contest and placed in both the Poetry on the Lake Competition, short poem category, and in the Hungry Hill Poetry Prize, in 2012. Her chapbook, Out of Nowhere (White Violet Press), is to be published in 2013.
Lois Elaine Heckman
Felicity
Felicity doesn't exist. She's just the reflection on a summer pond, those diamonds of sun that tease the eyes, momentarily dazzling vision. She's the rainbow in a lover's glance, that transforms gray reality into fleeting polychrome; or a mother's dream slowly taking shape in its struggle to be born. She inhabits the child's innocence as an imaginary friend, in the illusions of naiveté's pretense. She beguiles expectations into following her to phantom worlds, where she plays hide-and-seek until they give up searching. She is intangible, but no matter, for she never comes to life.