About Joan Houlihan To Celebrate the Empty Tomb

Joan Houlihan Nothing Sweet What can I have, now that I can't have eggs or hollow rabbits, eager on hind legs, the popped-out white surprise of animal candy eyes, or the jewels of Easter, jelly beans, strewn amid the shiny green basket grass - the ache of all that taste, put out for me. It couldn't last. A brace of buds and early clusters stand where foot of root puts firmly into ground and dizzy bees bump into air - stop and start- while squirrels compulsive, thread the yard - for something, they wind up and down the oak, as stars stay on at morning, and one stroke of wings brings down the nervous bird to listen for a squirming in the dirt. No chocolate, nothing sweet to eat, I watch the days go off to sleep. Childhood's diorama: family plots and shrinking dramas, tableau doves and fragile lambs; from behind a rock, the sparkly risen man, and I see myself through the sugared eye - tiny, aged - feeling along the candy lawn, blind as an egg. Joan Houlihan 's publications include The Gettysburg Review, Fine Madness, Black Warrior Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Marlboro Review, and Poetry International, among others. She is editor in chief of Perihelion and senior poetry editor of Del Sol Review, both published at www.webdelsol.com. Her chapbook, Our New and Smaller Lives, published by Black Warrior Review, can be viewed on Warrior Web. She also writes a column called The Boston Comment which deals with issues related to contemporary American poetry.