M.J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Recent poems appear in Tar River Poetry, miller's pond, Poetry Midwest, Blueline, Iconoclast, The Modern Review (Canada), Coffee House (UK), Flint Hills Review, Canter Collected, HazMat Review, The Comstock Review, Tar Wolf Review, Pebble Lake Review and Pearl; creative nonfiction in Short Takes: Brief Encounters         With Contemporary Nonfiction, edited by Judith Kitchen (Norton 2005), and fiction in Quarter After Eight. She has three chapbooks and a full-length collection, Night Traveler (Foothills Publishing, 2003). She is also the Writer-in-Residence and Director of the Arts Minor program at St. John Fisher College.

    Hypnotic—

	the cornfield glitters, teeming green and tassels bright— swirling under an opaque sky . . . Beneath my eyelids, vision vanishes into infrared— my mind's race–honeybees pulsating yellow— heat lightning caught in the clouds' ticking— begin counting: one— one thousand . . . Soothing trance— a glimpse of the brick house in the woods where I spent my childhood tedium sitting cross-legged with Life magazine, tracing every stonewall's distance . . . Lavender ponies in a meadow consumed my concentration until a sudden storm made me look out the window— raindrops plunking on hot asphalt— dazzling silver coins— enough for this world's lonesome ransom.

  Awakened, hours before dawn, rain

	becomes the clatter of so many drops collapsing into the bell of an abandoned glass— a lilting tune that slips away like suds, like shadows bruised in the night-light's milky glow. Nightmares flower in the glacial dark. Nothing put away, or finished— the corner chair struggles to hold tossed clothes. The night table teeters with its litter of books and letters, while time glitters on the sweep of a second hand. All around, messages pool— the drip of eaves, light on the horizon, small swirls of movement— everywhere at once. Awakened, hours before dawn, rain will also appear in The Hurricane Review's Autumn 2007 issue.