THE BONE FOLDERS Poems by T.A. Noonan ISBN 0-9723224-6-9 CONTENTS LILY: ALL THINGS UNEQUAL Difference Engine: logan Triptych A Chaos Theory La Grande Dame est morte! Vive la Grande Dame Releve The Feverroot Component No Zoning SARAH-FEY: VEXATION BIRTH How Witch Hazel Rides Her Broom Helen of Denham Lily in Sundress Dissecting an Orchid Villanelle from the Foster Daughter And a Bottle of Carrot Juice angle of the descant Facio ut facias Dew Point LILY: SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE Darjeeling PROGENITOR: UNE HISTOIRE FICTIVE Foundation LILY: CODEBREAKER Proserpine in Walker, Louisiana nouveau classique spellwork History of , Question of athame What it touches

T.A. Noonan's second collection of poetry, The Bone Folders, follows a coven of Louisiana witches through the death of their high priestess and the turmoil in the regime change that follows. Drawing upon interviews and experiences with modern practitioners of witchcraft, the poems combine innovative language with an overarching narrative that explores the complexities of love, history, spirituality, and personal sacrifice. Not to be confused with the supernatural tales of Anne Rice or Charlaine Harris, these beautiful and experimental poems come at this very real world through the lens of math, food, Greek mythos, grammar, sexuality, and the banal of the day-to-day. These poems in their dazzling craftsmanship explore the contemporary Pagan existence and the universal pain of human loss. "This is incantation. Noonan speaks; spells and forms and formulae leap into being. Very new, very, very old: poetry begins with naming, then metamorphosis. Dickinson's Letters to the World conjoins the 'hello world' introduction to Java and coffee ground soothsaying. 'O' the days begin, and they end with a loop, 'until what it touches / / : becomes what is touched.'" -Catherine Daly "Here, in The Bone Folders, the poem is an entity that springs from a love of language, algebra, and the landscape of the page. T.A. Noonan's tools are varied and sharp. She has a sculptor's eye for detail and an uncanny instinct for mining from the stone what the stone wants to be. With all her extravagances, spatial and intellectual, her eccentricities of grammar and syntax, her free form and reverent villanelles, she is the maker of language's shape, a craftsperson that knows that the center of an artist's commitment is to serve the work in progress. In all her abstract permutations is a focus on the truth. She is poetry's Henry Moore, giving shape to things and characters, particular and internal, to which, at the end of our reading we can only reply, YES." -Michael Madonick The Bone Folders is available now for $14.99. Order your copy today!

LILY IN SUNDRESS

No witch should let her death in by the door,
but she is here: a calla child in green
and white. (My daughter had a dress that worn
color; I hated it.) "She will put me in
the ground," I think, "this Lily girl." My floor
will give to her feet, fierce trees outside will lean
to shape their wood parabola; she'll core
a hole for bones and skin in planes between.

Can Lily see what I once had and gave
to age alone? My daughter's gone, and these
dames linger here like slick-tongue slugs on graves.
In mossy frills that garland--- Lily's knees,
I watched my daughter go, her bell-curve wave
rising, falling: the shape of arum leaves.



HELEN OF DENHAM

"third hand smoke victim"
--John Murphy


My mother licks the iron
(   element blazing colorless,
   steaming in the round    )
& says, Every block wore my neon once,
every john in town came here.
Miss Livingston Parish 19something---
(   my city, she reminds    )
---strip-mall queen guaranteed
for 1000 hours. Watch how she runs up
(   father's blue
   shirts, sleeves cast west    )
like Greek windsocks.
Remember how your cousin prayed
herself into a doe?,
while her left arm threads a yellow
(   burn in her house robe    )
neck through a hem.
Never let your family be
the engine that thrusts men toward you---
(   hang above the dryer,
   swear it!      )
---this is the electric city
syntax she teaches with her cigarette.
As if Endless Mountains rose to I-10.
As if Paris flashed behind her sheets



PROSERPINE IN WALKER, LOUISIANA


I am a firepit ---
no,
not a hole.

Call me empty
& miss the light I break:

landscaped in bonfire peaches

dawncurved fruit

fingers blazing

sigils slapdash on cheeks
a maze of molestruck sacks
silverflat

glint on silverflat eyes

handshakes
like anxious stars.

Look what you've made
by reaching into me.

I am no Proserpine but yours

born lilyshaped in dirt
too impure for anything but pressure.

I rinse myself in the basin
water running garnet thick.

What mouth is this

that gapes
saltpetre palmfuls

raises
bon feu bonfire good fire

I am a firepit ---
yes,

nothing but light when I open up
& warm on you.

Set your pallet on my back, Walker.

Turn the sun under my belly.