Khartoum to Karachi

that was her destination
leaning toward the final flight
on the sliver of silver
the remainder of dreams—
crashing in the desert,
the fear of not doing so,
then the landing in Calcutta,
factories and rickshaws, train whistles
the contemplation of civilization,
where unlike the sky, lie beginnings and endings,
but this is not about Amelia,
or her navigation through everyone's
egg blue frontier, this is about truce,
and the bare distance between continents and a hug
as blue deepens, boundaries cross and speech
translates to the language of the sky,
where capture and rescue are one and the same.

                                                                                for Joyce

The Fall

 dropping from the glittered trees
   leaves' boastful colors merge

     for an icy moment,

then wind's will sweeps
   them over the hardened grounds

 of an august passion,
   proud in its deliverance

the unwieldy autumn gust
  hounds the heavens

till the sky collapses clouds to ground
 all bronze and silver colors of the season,

     which knows the wind

spins everything a shade softer
 like the color of a palm
 
held open under a landscape of stars.

                                                             for Michelle Kwan

LAURIE KUNTZ holds an MFA from Vermont College.  She is the winner of the1999 Texas Review Chapbook Contest and her chapbook, Simple Gestures is published by Texas Review Press (2000). Edwin Mellen Press published her poetry collection, Somewhere in the Telling in 1999. Blue Light Press will publish her chapbook, Women at the Onsen, which placed first runner up in their annual contest, in 2001. Her poetry has been published in The Bloomsbury Review,The Macguffin, The Louisville Review, The Charlotte Poetry Review, The Roanoke Review, The Southern Review and other magazines.

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