Mary F. Morris currently lives in Washington, DC and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she has taught poetry in the schools, privately, and in small groups for over ten years.
Publications include Indiana Review, Quarterly West, Red Rock Review, Nimrod, and Blue Mesa Review. Sam Hamill of Copper Canyon Press selected her poem for the article titled, 'Poets Against the War,' for The Monthly Review, journal of politics.
Nominations include: Discovery Award for Poetry 2006 from the New Mexico Southwest Literary Foundation, finalist for the Faulkner Award and the Pablo Neruda Prize,, as well as various fellowships.
Educated at Oklahoma University, Long Island University where she studied with Billy Collins and the Southwest Literary Center where she received a full scholarship to study with Tony Hoagland. She has lived in Italy, Mexico, and the United States.
Poem from Indiana Review:
DR. ZAO'S HERBS
Insomniacs. It's this relation to the moon-
astronomer eyes, a super-lense telescope,
the ability to hear sex behind walls.
It's the way the third eye keeps vigil for the sick,
surveillance for a cure_ the way we have
shadows in common with the nocturnal-
yellow eyes which sweep the rooftops of night,
searching for some animal to hunt
or a viable tribe to drum with.
He takes my pulse: gaunt whisper, skitter
of a small animal, a color wheel
which whisks and blurs.
He performs with his needles- beautiful daggers,
long dashes
in an Emily Dickinson poem.
Tiny batons conduct music in blocked meridians,
a stimulator of qui within
the twelve stations of the body-
key to the kingdom of organs,
3,000 years of knowledge
assembled through a point.
There are herbs to take:
hooves of cattle during the Year of the Ox,
hair of a Bengali tiger during a total eclipse of the moon
gathered at the far most southern corner
of the Great Wall, wet ash
from a cremated geisha,
dust of jade found during the Ming dynasty,
rhizome of blue iris, feathers of red crane,
petals of peonies, chrysanthemum
powder, a blizzard of cherry blossoms,
scales of golden koi and crushed powder
of black pearl from the Sea of Japan.
Drink, and you shall become very small.
And I do; disappear
from the chorus of alert, fall
from the rim of awake,
scatting down the tunnel of dreams-
watery swim of eroticism,
visitation rights with the unborn,
scattered bones of the dead,
a terror of flaws
and a Chinese fortune of happiness,
the intuitive eyeball reversing
direction behind its lid-
I sleep and I sleep.
History undulates. Breath becomes
the unconscious even halo of oxygen.
Return appointment finds a different pulse-
the sound of a thousand paper parasols opening
before a storm on Wang Ho Street.
to solicit further work, contact: WATER400@aol.com