Heather Fowler

To know the heart is neither black nor white, that age does not mean safety, that our minds are the slaves of our hearts in every quiet moment. I discover and rediscover this endlessly. It is my Möbius strip of continuous awareness. May the circle be unbroken.

Website: www.heatherfowlerwrites.com

Accolades:

  • Work nominated for both the storySouth Million Writers Award and Sundress Publications Best of the Net.
  • Poetry nominated for the Pushcart Prize
  • Selected for a joint first place in the international 2007 Faringdon Online Poetry Competition (October 2007)

Publications:

  • SUSPENDED HEART, Collected Stories. Aqueous Books. December 2010
  • The Nervous Breakdown Poetry
  • Riverbabble
  • Poetic Diversity
  • The Medulla Review

Poem:

What A Man Will Say of Disposable Voyage Mermaids, When He Begins to Speak


He will say my ruse was overzealous and deathly simple.

He will say no stars were found in my eyes, though at times
He was conflicted not to touch me.
He will say we were loners, attracted to
Our tearful strata of the night stars, to their lonely, which seemed
The gas-eyed blowfish children’s toys of streetlamps flung on high.
He will say in mid-town Manhattan, as my split fin ached, he
Held me only once, twice, yet that June breeze that wrapped
Under my gauzy turquoise dress was warmer and more

Intimate than any (his embrace). He will say

He did not love me, that my face launched no ships, and that
His book of loving and abandoning
Had been written years before me.
He will say all pretense only kissed my lips like fish,
Meandering through his untrue tread of dreams.
He will say he hated me again, restate he never loved,
Mention I was some vagrant heart to have ever ventured
So deep above water into his catacomb eyes.

He will say this to my face. All this. And then embrace his lover.

But while he speaks, he’ll wear his shunner’s mask,
Will not look at me full-mast, will touch my regrown tail,
Wearing black like an officer, and stand. A single tear will
Venture down his face, in my open regard, while I
Match his offset gaze with my crotch-stabbed sorrow, yet,
Like always, in this way we will be paired: I will not laugh.
We finned cannot. I will neither cry. The tear of his
Not loving me will fall

Not to our sea, but down to stain his medaled bright

Lapel where badges cling like garbage barges
on this night water.
No, I will not cry,
but speak in a language none but us
could fathom, lengthily,
as if to enact change, since
from his loosened moisture
much like my home,

I’ll know he lies.

Category : 2011