LAURA SIMS
is the winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize. Her manuscript, Practice, Restraint, will be published by Fence Books in October. She recently published two chapbooks: Bank Book (Answer Tag Press) and Paperback Book (3rd Bed). Her poems have appeared or will soon appear in the journals First Intensity, La Petite Zine, How2, 6X6, 26, 3rd Bed, and Fence, among others. She has written book reviews for Boston Review, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, and an overview essay on the work of Diane Williams for The Review of Contemporary Fiction. In 2004, she was awarded First Prize in the Summer Literary Seminars writing contest, which provided her a month’s stay in St. Petersburg, Russia. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she teaches creative writing and composition at Madison Area Technical College and Edgewood College.

laura sims photo

photo credit
Thomas H. Garver

Poem

This is the park where flowers were fitted in spaces and fed.

I myself have been grimacing back.

Comprenez-vous? I offer to pencil you into my Book on Color.

This is the park where trees hang under the lake.

What did I offer you then? A vial of red? A little pressed boy in a cap?

Pencilled myself into beauty.

This is the park where Gladhands rummaged the lake.

Back into girlhood. How would you know him?

I myself have nicknamed the fountain's shades: Pumpkin, Honey-Bun, Witness, Sorry, and Sloth.

Do you remember him dying into the lake? He came up littered and silly.

Look for your name under "Table of Colors."

This is the park where

This is the park beauty
hangs in the lake and the needle-pines point

You will be featured on page 35 under "Salmon Pink."

back into beauty, girlhood, his cap. He was small and fit snugly into the dive.


"Poem" was published in Indiana Review

•   •   •   •   •


Democracy

One verdant minute

after the next, the love of the people

eludes him.


What does it mean? One thing unfolds


as a chain of things: the failure of making

a fantasy park

out of war


in an armchair,

the passage of hundreds of years


the loss of perpetual motion, the line

that proceeds

                      "a dark sky, and nothing but fire"

in his absence, the absence

of millions


"Democracy" was published in 26