Cosmology / Vanessa Stauffer

  dancing girl press, 2013$7.00  Vanessa Stauffer received a doctorate in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston and currently teaches in the creative writing program at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Brilliant Corners, Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, North American Review, among other journals. PERIPHERY The water whispered us closer than we’d been, so we traded sandals & the dirt path for bare skin, a velvet swath of jewelweed smithed in dew: tangles of stars gathering the sunset, pearled skeins between the limbs, a weave of dusk & youth snaring our feet until we quit the woods & gave the salt of summer bodies to the lake, the surface wind-lathed vermilion, incised with the shapes of pine & poplar. We fell between the shadows & turned our mouths to each other, bolder than we thought we could be, shocked& proud o