They passed each other in the burgundy hallway. 
He said, “I have compressed myself and promises 
into sequins, glitter, and nonpareils. 
I cast them in your direction.” 
She said, “I have distilled my hopes and expectations 
into cosmic dust and dogwood petals. Here, 
I let them slip from my fingers.” 
All of the potential and none of the responsibility, he thought. 
All of the options and none of the disappointment, she thought. 
They danced. 

—Inspired by the painting The Last Bouquet by Mary Hatch:

The Last Bouquet (oil on linen)

Copyrighted © by Mary Hatch. All rights reserved.
Appears here with artist’s permission.

Mary Hatch

is an artist and printmaker who received her B.S. and M.A. degrees at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where she currently resides and creates. She is co-author with poet Elizabeth Kerlikowske of Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry (Kazoo Books, 2018). Hatch’s work has been shown in more than 30 one-person exhibits in as many years and is included in more than 300 public and private collections throughout the US and Canada.

For more information, and to see more of her work, visit her website:
https://maryhatch.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Featured Artists Mary Hatch and Elizabeth Kerlikowske in KYSO Flash (Issue 9, Spring 2018); includes half a dozen of Kerlikowske’s ekphrastic prose poems and micro-fictions inspired by Hatch’s paintings

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s

new chapbook is The Vaudeville Horse (Etchings Press, 2022). Her first full-length book of poetry, Dominant Hand, is available from Mayapple Press, and she is co-author with artist Mary Hatch of Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry (Kazoo Books, 2018). Other books by Kerlikowske include The Shape of Dad (a memoir in prose poems), Last Hula (winner of the 2013 Standing Rock Chapbook Competition), and Chain of Lakes.

She has been publishing her poetry and fiction for more than 40 years in such journals and magazines as Encore, Cincinnati Review, Passager, and Poemeleon, among others. Recent poems have appeared in New Verse News and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

Her work is also anthologized in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine Press, 2016); The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women (Shade Mountain Press, 2015); two of the annual KYSO Flash anthologies, Accidents of Light (2018) and Earth Hymn (2019); and in the Michigan writers anthology published by Western Michigan University (WMU).

Formerly an arts activist, Kerlikowske was president of the Poetry Society of Michigan, and she served for 30 years as president of the Kalamazoo Friends of Poetry. She’s retired from a teaching career at Kellogg Community College. Recently, she took a project years in the making to a gallery, and the show opens on 22 August 2023.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ If my grandfather walked toward me with two arms, I wouldn’t recognize him, micro-CNF by Kerlikowske in Issue 11 of MacQ (January 2022); nominated for Best of the Net 2023

⚡ Into the Oak, prose poem by Kerlikowske in MacQ-9 (August 2021)

⚡ Three in Prose by Kerlikowske in DIAGRAM (Issue 5.1): “Forty Winks”; “The Girls’ Room”; and “Midway”