Marsha de la O’s book of poetry, Black Hope, won the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and a Small Press Editor’s Choice Award. She is the winner of the dA Poetry Award and the Ventura Poetry Festival Contest. With Phil Taggart, she is co-editor and publisher of the literary journal, Askew Artist’s Statement: I am a Californian poet. I grew up in one of the foothill cities bordering Los Angeles. The hill where I lived was steep with unstable soil, so the boxy houses that gradually appeared stood on stilt-leg girders. Behind them near the top of the mountain were the acres that no one developed, California foothill chaparral with its possums and skunks, its roadrunners and desert tortoises, its scrub laurel and sumac. On the hill immediately across from our house stretched the manicured lawns, faux Romanesque chapels and marble temples of Forest Lawn Cemetery. Anytime I looked up from my ever-present book, I could see mourners or gravediggers. In a sense, everything was right there for me in preparation for becoming a poet: an emerging habit of solitude, nature and the rough redemption it seemed to promise, books and the realm of imagination, and the overriding presence of death and all that humans do in response. I Have Not Said If I Believe She sprang out of the pine plank table at Nana’s house, a witch with a rope around her neck and all the havoc spilling out encoded in our DNA. I studied a dipping barometer and felt dirty beneath my clothes, a bone fingered and sucked. Mother favored gray for me, not that it mattered a flip. Elder brother carried our witch sewn in a vein in his thigh. I did not think she hammered there. They set a match to sixteen candles. She was hung not burnt, he announced, pressure falling, needle notching toward dimensions where a witch is hanging still, her ankles stretched longer than human, she had six children, her name was Lydia. He started the song for ha-ha. Never been kissed, crooned first brother, lost count, cracked the other, sally, sally, I muttered while mother’s mouth goes darker and tighter. Hurry up and blow. Everyone laughed when the flames died out. Vist My Web Site - Click Here