Ephemera for poems by Lisa Fishman and C.S Carrier

Counting down to the launch of Little Red Leaves #6: The Ephemera issue. I've completed two more poems for this issue and have stepped back for a second to talk a little about the how-and-why.

Lisa Fishman submitted a gorgeous short poem called [Can you carry this object]. The poem's short lines, teetering on curt, generate a kind of unfolding conversation wrapped around playful grammatical oppositions. The paper airplane ephemera design was inspired by the title of the poem as well as this folding/unfolding structure. You have to construct the airplane in order to read the poem.


C.S. Carrier sent us an equally excellent abecedarian poem entitled For a Lyric Opera. After bumbling through a few drafts of ill-conceived versals, I settled on the most literal ephemerization possible. I made the poem into lyrics/notes. Holding this piece in my hand, I swear I get hymnal flashbacks from my southern baptist days. As Carrier says: "...O lyric, god's foreskin / O meringue that dries, hardens the ceiling..."