Joy Olivia Yourcenar

Pablo Neruda's Shopping List

The scent of mangos,
intoxicating as the inner curve
of a woman's hip.

Guitar strings,
three wait impatiently
to be restrung

and a fishhead
for the cat's critique.

The Truth About Cats and Parables

A sparrow caught in ice
sings a song of frenzy,
flutters wings,
tries to flee to flight
icebound,
feels no hand upon her.
Winter's an impartial bitch;
universally malicious;
Not so the cat, crouched, focused
tail twitching sinuously,
watching, pouncing Death.
Flurry of feather, fang and claw
leaves two bloody stumps
frozen in the ice
inevitable as red shoes
in a bitter man's fairytale.

Joy Olivia Yourcenar writes: I am a poet, expatriate and freelance technical editor lucky enough to live and write in Halifax, Nova Scotia with my life partner, the photographer Eric Boutilier-Brown, and my daughter, Zöe-Genevieve, future empress of the known world. I have two personal websites: Mythologies (my own site) and icon/graphy (a collaborative visual poetry site with Eric). I have been published on-line in Gravity, The Astrophysicist Tango Partner Speaks, Avalon and The Initiative and off-line in The Maine Review, The Stolen Island Review, and Silhouettes in the Electric Sky. In August, 1999, Ryan Deschamps and I will be hosting Bareit's Private Tears, the 1999 Canadian picnic for rec.arts.poems. The best way to get to know me is through my poetry.