Nancy Flynn hails from the anthracite coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, birthplace of other world shakers and movers including Joe Biden, Mary Jo Kopechne, and HBO.  A budding writer since elementary school, she won her first literary prize in 1965 at the age of ten when her essay “Our Friend, the Moon” took second place in the Junior Project Competition sponsored by the Educational ABCs of Industry in Niagara Falls, New York. She attended Oberlin College, Cornell University, and has an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from SUNY/Binghamton.

Her writing has received a James Jones First Novel Fellowship, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and recognition from the Oregon State Poetry Association. In 2007, her poetry chapbook, The Hours of Us, was published by Finishing Line Press and nominated for an Oregon Book Award. A story, “Cut Off, ” published in the VoiceCatcher 4 anthology of Portland women’s writing has been nominated for a 2010 Pushcart Prize. In addition to her work with WritersDojo.org, she is a member of the VoiceCatcher  editorial collective, a contributing editor for the art journal, ATC Quarterly, and a poetry editor for the Poets Against War website. More about Nancy and her writing on her web site: www.nancyflynn.com.

Transubstantiation

It’s a slow, cumulative suffering she carries

into her dreams, oven mitts too thin

to keep the burn from her hands.

Whenever he’s back from the dead, she can’t

touch his body, naked under goose down,

lost in the curled bone-cage of a bird.

Even now, she can conjure the day,

his hanging from that tree, then flit

from him to a man in Mississippi,

white faces leering beneath his feet.

Until she decides he is better left

a faux Icarus, flown too far from the sun.

His feathers scatter in the sound,

dance shoes on whitecaps still bobbing,

the wind too fierce a tempo

to quell her flotilla of question marks.