The bare legs of a woman 

are all we see, two legs 
turned to the right, 

the right leg, poised 
on the ball of the foot, 

while the left leg 
barely touches its toes, 

as if the legs 
wanted to walk away, leave 

the woman we do not see, 
but find themselves 

caught in angles 
that converge too many times, 

trapped in shadows 
that fall without coherence, 

leaving only bare legs, 
suspended in a step. 

Dialectics: Untitled 7 (photograph)

Copyrighted © by Ralph Mercer. All rights reserved.
Photograph appears here with the artist’s permission.

Ralph Mercer,

a New England native, is an alumnus of Rhode Island School of Design where he obtained a BFA in photography and studied with Harry Callahan and Bert Beaver. He received his MFA in visual design from the University of Massachusetts, where he studied with Dietmar Winkler and Elaine Fisher, and taught photography as a graduate teaching assistant.

With a studio in Boston, MA, he specializes in digital photography and photo-collage, creating fine art photography with an emphasis on the figurative and the landscape. His images are licensed worldwide and published in a range of digital and printed media. In addition to being a full-time artist, he is a photographic illustrator and carries out portrait commissions and other photographic projects.

Artist’s website: https://www.ralphmercer.com/

Gary S. Rosin’s

poetry and haiga have appeared, or are forthcoming, in various literary and poetry magazines such as Concho River Review, Failed Haiku, Harbinger Asylum, KYSO Flash, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Poetry24, The Legal Studies Forum, and Visions International; as well as in several anthologies, including Faery Footprints (Fae Corp Publishing), Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga (Dos Gatos Press), Texas Poetry Calendar (Kallisto Gaia Press), Untameable City: Poems on the Nature of Houston (Mutabilis Press), and elsewhere.

His poem “Viewing the Dead” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Two of his poems appear in Silent Waters, photographs by George Digalakis (Athens, 2017). He is the author of two chapbooks, Standing Inside the Web (Bear House Publishing, 1990) and Fire and Shadows (Legal Studies Forum, 2008) (offprint).

Selections of Gary’s poetry and photography can be found at his website, 4P Creations: http://4pcreations.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Crossing Kansas by Gary S. Rosin in The Wild Word (7 February 2020); includes audio of the poet reading his poem