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Poem by Morgan Harlow

Eyewear is very glad to welcome the American poet Morgan Harlow this Friday.

Harlow was raised in Madison, Wisconsin and studied English literature, journalism and film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed the MFA at George Mason University in 1999.

A Pushcart nominee, Harlow's poems and fiction can be found in Washington Square Review, Descant, the Tusculum Review, Nthposition, and elsewhere. Her essay on Ray Bradbury's work has been reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism.

Harlow has worked as an editor in the medical and social sciences and taught as an adjunct. She lives in rural Wisconsin with her husband and their sons.


A Partial Lexicon: "Fresh" and Related

Of all words contributed to English
by Felines, perhaps the one which
retains most its original flavor is the adjective
"fresh," demanding a squinching of the eyes
and nose for articulation in the Cattish.

The word's true usage occurs in two instances,
"fresh water," and "fresh kill;" the nouns,
of Old English and Old High German, arguably
reach a higher level of meaning with augmentation
from the Cattish than could ever have been
accomplished without. Similar expressions exist
in the Old Norse, Slavic and Portuguese, however,
these have origin in the Ermine and so are not to be
discussed here.

Other words derived from Cattish are "lime-twig,"
most recently a verb [to ensnare small birds, as in
(loosely translated) 'a lime-twigging we will go'] and
"rrrowl," not occurring in most dictionaries, being
too animal and the triple r beginning not formally
recognized in English. However, rrrowl has been
used optimally by Roy Orbison in "Pretty Woman,"
and by Bob Hope in his acting with fair accuracy.

"Meow," a word commonly thought to be of Cattish
origins, is actually of the Meerkat. It is all too easy
to confuse the two as both languages allow
impulsive, even reckless grammar and have no
alphabet or conjugating schemes that we know of.

poem by Morgan Harlow

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