© 2007-2010 Mascara Poetry Inc. First Published April 07, ISSN: 1835-4017   All Rights Reserved All work in Mascara is the sole property of the artists and may not be reproduced for any purpose without permission.

Issue Five - June 2009

Anca Vlasopolos

Anca Vlasopolos was born in Bucharest, Rumania. Her father, a political prisoner of the Communist regime in Rumania, died when Anca was eight. After a sojourn in Paris and Brussels, at fourteen she immigrated to the United States with her mother, a prominent Rumanian intellectual and a survivor of Auschwitz. Anca is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her poetry collection is titled Penguins In A Warming World. Anca is also the author of an award winning novel, The New Bedford Samurai and the memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement.

Wedded Bliss

gold bands glint
over a plastic bucket
where two pairs of hands
lovingly
gut
fish no bigger
than the hands

this could be a portrait
of marriage
man and woman
in harmonious
complicity
fish gored bleeding
from the side

Above the Bird’s Eye View

winter this year
sprang
a lynx
from still full-leaved branches

huge paws of wind to bat us
should we raise eyes toward light
or sigh at the thin horizon
arriving earlier each day

in this desolation in drab and gray
i look from a second-story window
see him—olive camouflage
for a pulsebeat unzipped

his rich summer gold
streaking
sun bullet
bursting through lynx dominion