Featured Poem II • July 2015
Ariel’s Release
Sandi Leibowitz
No more for me servitude’s blue balmy isles. Wastes white as novitiates tempt me. My rude hollers violate their pious silence, crack the ill-tempered glaciers, set the walrus’ tusks a-quiver. Or I navigate green channels fathoms deep, poke the empty sockets of dead granddads with impertinent fins and mate the maelstrom. No more the meek and mincing chorister, my laughter’s thunder topples bell-towers, my cantillations frenzy the cataracts. I slither out of flesh to rise diffuse, let myself fall in liquid singularity, one solitary raindrop. O trembling transparency, a self to harbor rainbows in! Subtlety may someday bore me and I’ll choose to vault not merely space but time. Re-attiring myself in corporeality, as Parisian boulevardier I’ll savor croissant’s buttery melt, steam rising off my café crème silvery as any sylph, while a phonograph husks, lusher than lagoons, the blue voice of Billie Holiday.
Sandi Leibowitz is a school librarian, classical singer and writer of speculative poetry and fiction. Her works, which appear in places like Kaleidotrope, Lakeside Circus, Liminality and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year 5, have been nominated for the Rhysling, Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize. A native New Yorker, she’s flown over the Rio Grande in a hot-air balloon, followed the trail of medieval pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela and visited Arthur in Avalon.
Discussing “Ariel’s Release,” she writes, “Who does not long to be a shape-shifter? As someone who experiences daily physical pain, I fantasize about unzipping myself from this particular mortal form and even briefly flirting with incorporeality. But then I am much in love with this physical world of ours. Without ears, how should we experience music? Literature, especially speculative literature, enables us all to become shape-shifters.”
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