Born in Buffalo, NY, Danna Ephland is a Lincoln Center trained teaching-artist offering indie writing workshops called The Left Margin. She earned a BFA in dance from York University, Toronto, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame. Bodysongs is her hybrid work in movement and poetry, currently part of a course at Western Michigan University where she has taught in the Dance Department and the Education and Holistic Health Departments. Her poems have appeared in Rhino, Indiana Review, Folio, Permafrost and the anthologies, Saints of Hysteria (Soft Skull Press) and Villanelles (Knopf). A Small Acrylic Framewon the Celery City Chapbook Competition 2015.
Still Life with Smokestack, Chickens
Needle rides the hem of a black linen shirt
into the Art Institute, looks for her reflection
in each picture she passes. All along the galleries
she watches for tower, turret or stack – smoking
like her dad, who’d have enjoyed this perhaps.
She’ll never know. If she’s succeeded, they’ll
never know where to find her. Needle is a glint
in the heap that hides her. Her eye threads silk,
cotton, bits of wire or grass, till the cows
come home, the chickens roost, the yellow bed
lies empty. The bed Needle made all by herself.