Nancy A. Henry is an attorney who, for twenty years, has practiced in the field of child advocacy, criminal prosecution, juvenile criminal defense and mental health advocacy. She is a former prosecutor and Assistant Attorney General of the State of Maine in the department of Child Protection., Her poetry has appeared in over 200 publications in the US and UK; her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Yemassee, Poetry International, St. Anthony Messenger, Roanoke Review, Iris, Kalliope, The Hollins Critic, Legal Studies Forum, and Cream City Review. She has published five chapbooks of poetry: Brie Fly (now out of print); Anything Can Happen and Hard (MuscleHead Press); Europe on Five Dollars a Day and Eros Ion (Moon Pie Press). Her work has been anthologized in Grace Notes (Sheltering Pines Press), Velvet Avalanche (Donna Hill, Ed.), Fierce With Reality (Margaret Cruikshank, Ed.), and A Sense of Place (Bay River Press), as well as the first Moon Pie Press anthology, A Moxie and a Moon Pie. She is a five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Her poem People Who Take Care was recently selected by Garrison Keillor for presentation on The Writers Almanac. In 2003, she co-founded Moon Pie Press, a publisher of poetry chapbooks and anthologies. Nancy's first full-length poetry collection, Our Lady of Lets All Sing, is forthcoming in Spring 2007 from Sheltering Pines Press. Nancy has two grown children and lives in Westbrook, Maine with her husband, Dr. Harold Persing, a physicist and bass player, and their three cats: Moxie, Moon Pie, and Fred Astaire.
The woman's dark hair hangs down.
She is searching a map,
her blank face innocent as a scoured bowl.
In the dirt street, the winds
commit their acts of piracy.
Beyond the lurid crucifixions
of the meat, beyond
the buzzing, gold-eyed fish,
we watch the knife boys
lay bone bare from flesh
with silken grace.
We eat
the bread of sorrow
which we were not
made to know.
You sip your bitter wine,
observe the visible harmonies
of disintegration, the passage
of bare feet in ashes.
In a motel six miles east,
we shed our dust,
let loose our howling love.
Branch of coral,
strand of bells,
blood and saffron scarves.
Woe unto man,
who has lost the blessedness
for which he was created.
It's curious where different people think their mind is. A lot of people believe that their mind is in their brain. To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body - the senses are part of the brain. - Sharon Olds
