​​POETRY  -  
          With a Theme of Time 

"the form
that holds all the water, all the earth,
every single thing singing through them."
​
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The Octopus Pot
by Dan Liberthson

In Nauplion, city of myriad tiles,
the octopus pot dances in a museum corner,
dances for itself and the few who witness,
limbs of three invertebrates flowing
around its globe in womanly curves,
shaping since Minos’ time the form
that holds all the water, all the earth,
every single thing singing through them.
 
A rumpled guard rests on the sill
smoking beneath the No Smoking sign
with no idea he would disperse
like his milky penumbra if not for
the embrace of three octopi
swaying in the sea encircling a pot
hollow but full of time and its children,
everything we are, and are not.
 
Author’s Note: This poem was previously published in the book Animal Songs (©2010) by Dan Liberthson).

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Dan Liberthson was born in Rochester, New York and attended Northwestern University and SUNY at Buffalo (PhD, English). He has retired from a career as a medical writer, and lives in San Francisco and Cottage Grove, Oregon. He has published five books of poetry and has published individual poems in anthologies and journals, including The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, South Coast Poetry Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Chaminade Literary Review and Triggerfish. He was Secretary of the Oregon Poetry Association (2019-2022), and took second place in the William Stafford Memorial Award Poetry Contest (2020) and the Maine Poets Society Contest (2022). He also published The Bluejay Contrivance, a spy novel, and The Golden Spider, a middle-grade fantasy novel. For more information, visit liberthson.com.

Other works in this issue:
Poetry:
In a Room on a Courtyard in Firenze
Banana Slug

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