Mixed-media collage of poetry and hand-made paper by
Ellaraine Lockie, and watercolor art by Phyllis Ross

Copyright © by Ellaraine Lockie and Phyllis Ross. All rights reserved.
Work appears here with permissions from both artists.

Second Opinion


One rebel cell that won’t
conform to the norm
The surgeon says pre-cancerous
is a polite term for predestined death

His diagnosis synonymous with demand
for the cutting edge of conservative
So he sharpens his blades
to butcher half my left breast

I with equally whetted words
and weightier sarcasm 
suggest slicing the rest of the breast
And why not the other as well

Obliterate all that worry
To which the surgeon wishes
all women should be so wise
But not as sharp-witted as this one 

Who walks away from the malignancy 
of medical madness
Into the rationality of research
One rebel woman who won’t
conform to the norm

—“Second Opinion” was published previously in San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly (2002); appears here with author’s permission.

Dead before their prime—
cut flowers on the altar
My brother in an urn

Artist’s Commentary

Pollage is a word I coined for the art pieces that combine my passions for handmade papermaking, poetry, and collage. I use lifetime collections of handmade papers, postage stamps, charms, milagros, buttons, shells, rocks, feathers, pressed leaves and flowers, rubber stamps, travel memorabilia, and magazine clippings to illustrate the embedded poems. I use no glue, only paper pulp to hold the items together.

Ellaraine Lockie’s

pollages combine handmade papermaking, poetry, and collage. They have appeared in juried art shows around the country and have been the subject of a one-woman gallery art show and several online essays and interviews. They also exist in several private art collections and have appeared in: The Centrifugal Eye, Rio Grande Review, Homestead Review, Sein Und Werden (England), Prairie Connection, Ascent Aspirations, and Alchemy. Ellaraine’s book The Gourmet Paper Maker (how to make paper with the inedible parts of fruits and vegetables) is published in six languages.

She is also widely published and awarded as a poet and essayist. Tripping with the Top Down is her thirteenth chapbook. Earlier collections have won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England, and the Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award.

Ellaraine has been awarded multiple residencies and fellowships from both Centrum and Summer Literary Seminars, and thirty of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She also teaches writing workshops, frequently judges poetry contests, and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine Lilipoh.

[One of her ekphrastic poems, The Animal Inside, also appears here in Issue 10 of KYSO Flash.]

Phyllis Ross

is a graduate of the School of Industrial Arts, now known as the School of Art and Design in New York City, and she has also attended the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is a fiber artist who has worked in the fashion industry for many years and has studied with Kaffe Fasset (color and design), Constance Howard, and Jacquline Entoven.