Two By Dina Marie Varsalone

We at Shattered Wig Empire in The Ether hope you had a great Thanksgivikkah yesterday, even if it ended weeping to Jim Reeves' "The Blizzard" next to the fireplace with grandpa telling you to get your act together. We ourselves are far from home doing a special report in Alabama.

Here are two beautiful, sparse poems by Dina Varsalone to soothe you as you ponder family, time, mortality and the straining at your waistline.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ideas Of Order

Each false
thing ends.


How did we
come to think


ill humor
should mask


as youth?
We lay


sticky with sleep,
the sense against


calamity. The room
is a quiet, shrinking


motive for metaphor.
The stillness


is the stillness
of the mind.


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Fixer of Midnight

Winter dark,
I dropped


into his sea
of a body


for a touch
of salt.


Fogs descended.
Leaning back


I crossed
a hand


over my eyes;
flinging aside


theoretical things,
I could not count on


the stars
or anything else.


I’m growing old
back into odd places.


From the air,
of the body.


And then the window
blotting out reason.




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Dina Varsalone grew up in New Hampshire and now lives in Baltimore Md where she runs writing workshops at the Mill Centre in Hampden. Her work has appeared in print in her self-published zines Ablerug and Take Me, I'm Yours! as well as Reed Magazine, The Watermark, and Embrocation Cycling Journal. She's currently at work on a book of poems and a humor book based on her blog, How to Waste Your Youth (for fun and profit!). Read more of her work at Dinamarietv.com.