Fourteen-year-old girl lit by thrill, her clit,
an obedient lantern in his hands,
the winter basket of his tongue, the bone
white buttons of her blouse on the wood floor—
sinking gray winter light. Where had she imagined
this could carry her, knocked out and gasping
like a child fallen from the iron monkey bars at school.
In whose shadow did she return
to the field behind her family’s house, the wet
grass darkening the toes of her white sneakers
and the June’s wafting of wild strawberries,
each tuft of them, an island,
an archipelago of fruit in a field
marking safety, marking pleasure, hot
strawberry on her tongue.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn's poems have appeared in Paris Review, Plume, Poetry London and the NYT, among others. Her third book, ECHOLOCATION, published by PLUME Editions/MadHat Press in 2018, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award.

Barnaby Furnas is a contemporary American painter known for his gestural paint handling and chaotic imagery. In his portrayals of violent battlefield scenes, the artist melds the formal virtuoso of historical painting techniques with emblems of American history, as seen in his Untitled (Antietam) II (2008). “Paintings don’t just show one minute happening. They can show an hour of things happening,” he has said. Born in Philadelphia, PA in 1973, he received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1995 and his MFA from Columbia University in 2000. Over the years that followed, the artist has been the subject of numerous exhibitions. His works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others.