Maverick's Feature Poet for Issue #2 is National Endowment for the Arts Fellow Martha Modena Vertreace, who is Distinguished Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Kennedy-King College, Chicago IL. Her several books include: Second House from the Corner, Under a Cat's-Eye Moon, Oracle Bones, Cinnabar, Smokeless Flame, Kelly in the Mirror, Maafa: When Night Becomes a Lion, Dragon Lady: Tsukimi, Glacier Fire, and Light Caught Bending and Second Mourning, published by Diehard Publishers, Edinburgh, through Scottish Arts Council grants.

Named the Glendora Review Poet, Lagos, Nigeria, she was twice a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Writers' Retreat in Scotland. Eastern Washington University chose her as Poetry Fellow in residence at the Writers Center, Dublin, Ireland. She was a Fellow at St. Deiniol's Library, Hawarden, Wales, on a bursary.

She has poems in Illinois Voices: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 2001). Her most recent Pushcart nomination was for "When Pockets Held Dreams", published in After Hours: the Chicago Journal of Writing and Art. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Tim, and their cats, Bon-Bon, Fred, and Patrick Samuel.

Awash in lace, linen, silk, the well-stretched canvas
of her eighth-month pregnancy laid bare, the woman
says, I want to feel beautiful
when reporters wonder why she pays a kohl-eyed artist
in silver bangles, plum-dried sari to spin

 On the snack counter, the cross country train,

    a lucite aquarium

houses guppies the size of thumbnail parings

    darting among seeweed stalks

which wave when I lift the box

    eye level, silver fins

You need to know I moved your stuff into my house--

    in case you wonder who took


books and bookcases, highboy, footstool, dishes, rugs--

    still good stuff, you would say,

I' m not sure I can do this

count hawks--

overshadowing us as they become dragons


whose ashen wings lure us

      to the brittle edge

of the world, glazing the fountain which sprays

Meaty shadows pull my tourist-curiousity

to the rusted gate, to pelt matted with rainwater,

feces, mud of clover fields--sheep, cows, goats