Cruel Elevation Unfailingly I imagine you as a mountain that I have to climb because it’s there, looking closest to the clouds. Up there their moisture lands fastest frozen in chunks of interlaced spaces a blanket of spaces for sounds to fall into to carry a voice to be buried under my footing slipping, sliding across the soft surface of a hidden topography wanting really to be sliding into you not on you, strange there on a high peak.

Sylvia Parker is a writer, visual artist and art education administrator at the School of Visual Arts. Her poetry has been published in Art and Academe, Vols. 9 and 10 (1997) and Snakeskin Webzine (1999). She has had solo visual art exhibitions at Visual Arts Gallery (1990) and Woods Hall Photo Gallery, University of Alabama (1990) Reviews of her work have appeared in The Village Voice and Art Papers. Her work was shown in the group exhibition, SOHO20 Invitational (1998). Created with Rose Viggiano, a collaborative mural incorporating one of her poems was exhibited at SOHO20 Gallery in March 2000. She has designed and fabricated several artist books and founded the web site Poetry, Visual Poems and Others in 1999.