Theresa Boyar

TRANSLATIONS OF PEACE

A letter to the editor
calls them "nude Jane Fondas" --
these women who gather
on a Montana hillside, blue morning
of midwinter raising clouds from their lips,
so it would seem they were wreathed
in nimbi, a gathering of phantoms,
numbering fifty, bent on peace.
The orchestration of their bodies,
some curled, some straight,
autographs a backdrop of prickly pear
and snow.  Other cities
have women spinning
a mobile peace sign
over bright grass, rosaries
of sweat glittering on their breasts. 
It's positively tropical
to the women on the hill,
the cold locked in their joints,
cold of the frozen ground and iced plants,
cold of the lurid pink
their skin has become.
They gift the camera's lens
with a frost-limbed alphabet
and hope what survives
translation will include
a Middle Eastern schoolhouse
where children interpret globes, 
thumbs tracing the delicate blue
of rivers, questioning the security
of the geography they handle
with warm, distant fingers.

Date of Birth:	August 31, 1969
Location:	Helena, Montana
Email:	boyar4@aol.com
Publications:	The Paumanok Review, Samsara Quarterly, The Adirondack Review, Pierian Springs, Wicked Alice, DMQ Review, Eclectica, etc.
Awards:	Finalist for the 2002 Katharine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction; 1998 Pushcart Prize nominee

- December 2003 - Translations of Peace Limbs Sacred Ground Surrealism Du Jour Winter Flowers Mourning has its season as all things have Paint Job, July 2001 sword lily Tetragrammaton