Poet and essayist Joanna Penn Cooper is the author of The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press) and What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press). Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, South Dakota Review, Zocálo Public Square, Poetry International, and other journals. Joanna teaches online workshops in flash memoir and lyric essay for Creative Nonfiction. Previous chapbooks include Mesmer from dancing girl press and When We Were Fearsome from the Ethel Zine.
R. Bratten Weiss is a writer, organic grower, and free-range academic residing in rural Ohio. Her poems and essays have appeared in Two Hawks Quarterly, The Green Room, The Cerurove, Figroot Press, Lycan Valley Press Publications, The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Jesus the Imagination, The Tablet, US Catholic, The Connecticut River Review, and the Ethel Zine. She is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and edits the literary journal Convivium as well as Patheos Catholic.
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You Correspond with a Woman in Ohio
She is someone you’ve never actually met. Every so often, you get an update. She has planted the seed potatoes. She’s transplanted the seedlings. She’s been out in a field wrestling a pony or a tree. She homeschools her children and writes about different things “pro-life” could mean. In these ways she seems very different from you. She has gone deep in philosophy, read more Derrida, more of the ancients.
Over the course of your correspondence, you begin to discuss your dreams. Begin, in fact, to have dreams that echo the other’s. There is a house, creepy yet somehow luminous. Stables. Treasure, possibly, among the muck. But should you be there? Who (or what) lurks in the dim?
jpc