14x17cm, 24 pages, 250 gsm green Strata Cover,  sewn with green twist.  Cover image shows a detail from Adam and Eve  by Lucas Cranach.  ISBN 1 903090 15 6  See below for extract.  Ordering Information. Click here to read Rosmarie Waldrop's author page at the Stationhill website. Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop run Burning Deck, which they founded in 1961.

from Blackwards:
 

                                                        NO APPLES HERE

                                                                                                                For Norma Cole

OUT OF SALT, sulphur, mercury. To be born is in itself deadly. Got a knife? She had a telescope with which she viewed the heavens from her roof. Women are well positioned to focus on unstable subjects. At the height of the Roman Empire, average life expectancy was less than 25 years. I dropped my letter into the mailbox and walked toward St. Paul’s.
 

What constitutes a body? What you keep, what you throw. Death fell savagely on the unstable subjects. She positioned me by the telescope for a squint at the stars. Hardly a recipe for begetting children. Our lives being now language, the emphasis has moved. More and more often I don’t arrive at the mailbox I set out for.
 

This does not concern the outward aspects of the body. For the Roman population to remain stable each woman would have had to produce 5 lives being now language. Rabbits, even fish dropped into the mailbox. The stars revealed that I should take a long voyage over the Ocean to the New World. An average of 5 children grazed thin by death. Artifice of human perception, or objects as events. The word “moth” appeared on my tongue more and more often when I stepped on a crack in the sidewalk.
 
Take a house, jointly owned. The solemn words that flow through the marriage bed. The pressure on the young women, or event as object. That I should bear a blessed babe whose father’s father never sailed in Noah’s Ark. The desire for immortality a crack in the sidewalk. I don’t mind missing the mailbox. It is as much an error to hold to your purpose as not to have one.
 
All things were made out of nothing, by a word alone. Only creating man required salt, sulphur, mercury. Young girls were recruited early for the task. In waltz time, rehearsing loss. I was taught “shalom” to say to my husband once I met him in the New World. As if subject and object had fixed positions. I prefer a purpose I do not need to hold on to in order to arrive at a mailbox not near St. Paul’s.
 

                                                    THE MERE FACT OF BIRTH
 
 

SAD, SO SAD, apples in autumn. There were times when the mere fact of birth did not make a child a person. And nothing is more opposed in geometry than a straight line and a boy’s first ejaculation. A thought misplaced in the body. On one side the pistols of the police, on the other, (op)position of upper and lower jaws.
 

Inconsolable apples in a straight line. The child still considered as much a fetus as there were times. In an infinitely great circle the circumference coincides with jaws from adjacent nations. The fall of man misinterpreted as geometry. Armored cars and agents provocateurs looking like anyone else. If we could misplace the symptoms, the mere fact of upper and lower.
 

The sun departs. Beyond adjacent nations. The child’s father must lift it up from the floor in a straight line. In both the infinitely great and small circle, boys set out to rob the orchard. And the socket of the eye surrounds the ball in so close a manner it derails the train of thought. Then the body becomes geometrical. Though if we displayed apocalyptic symptoms time might break the circumference.
 

Anguish enters the city. Armored cars. If the father did not lift the little bundle of ensouled geometry. Great and small are concepts valid only in the realm of finite apple-theft. When a straight line is drawn through the forehead and upper lip the train of thought departs. Profound rage, pain, birth of apocalyptic symptoms. In the beginning was interpretation. Next day the press was closed down.
 

The mere fact, the time of anguish, the fall of man. The ensouled bundle must wait to be collected in a straight line. In the infinite, nothing is greater or smaller than upper lip and adjacent language. If we fooled ourselves into thinking conflict might be stopped. What would happen to apocalypse?
 

If not picked up. Anguish outside the series of great and small. Misquoting cranial features he refers to the center nowhere or everywhere. Between obedience and knowledge any child will choose the apple. Pistols cause the most striking interpretations whereas a boy's first ejaculation moves out of range.