Tibetan Prayer Wheels The clippings arrived when the world was reawakening to April. I pieced together the sound of fenders against lampposts, imagined an orbit of henna hair snagging the steering wheel. Seasons later, February's icy limbs shine like silver streamers marking the month your life began, and ended, at forty -- you were tired, closed your eyes for a moment and the shifting weight of your foot on the pedal, the velocity of blacktop waxed to a final trance -- the kind Tibetan women move to circling a stupa, the downy rings of their breath echo mantras through icy mornings, whirling tin prayer wheels chap their fingers to a crusty red -- the color of squashed berries, or your hair, their every thought lost to the rhythm of a wheel. Was it like that? The last spin blooming to a single moment, which nothing prepares you for, thoughts ending on the pivot of a wheel taking you to the edge of a final sound -- like mantras whispered by women walking into a reverie of endless blessing.

Laurie Kuntz worked in a Vietnamese refugee camp in the Philippines for over a decade. She holds an MFA from Vermont College and currently works as a lecturer in English at the University of Maryland's Asian Campus in Misawa, Japan, where she also serves as editor of the literary magazine Blue Muse.. Laurie's chapbook, Simple Gestures will be published by Texas Review Press in 2000. A previous poetry collection, Somewhere in the Telling was published by Edwin Mellen Press in 1999. Laurie is also the author of two English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) books.

A winner of many poetry prizes, Laurie has published poems in The Bloomsbury Review, The Louisville Review, The Charlotte Poetry Review, The Roanoke Review, The Southern Review, The Eleventh Muse, Poetry Miscellany, The New Virginia Review, Crosscurrents, The South Florida Review, The Sun, The Contemporary Review and other magazines.

She lives in northern Japan with her son and husband, but you can chat with her without long distance charges at Kuntz@infoaomori.ne.jp.

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