for Andy, September 3, 2007
Painted the year our son was born, the year
after we
married, the year the Buddhist monk set himself
on fire,
in Saigon, Vietnam, two warriors, part ancient
Roman, part
horse, going at each other in the midst of green
fields—
in the background a church—trampling
a mother
and a screaming infant with a hoof that looks
like a hand.
Liane Ellison Norman won the Wisteria Prize for 2006, awarded by Paper Journey Press, for her poem "What There'd Been." She has also been published in the journal Rune, in Voices From the Attic (Carlow University Press, 2007), in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and Pittsburgh City Paper. Her first book of poetry, The Duration of Grief, was published in 2005 by Smoke & Mirrors Press, which also published her novel, Stitches in Air: A Novel About Mozart's Mother (2001). A biography, Hammer of Justice: Molly Rush and the Plowshares Eight (1990) and Simpleton Story: A Fairy Tale For a Nuclear Age (1985) were published by PPI Books.