Judith H. Montgomery lives with her husband and Springer spaniel, Ruby, in the High Desert of Oregon, where she also writes, teaches, and gardens in defiance of deer.  Her poems appear in The Southern Review, The Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, and Northwest Review, among other journals, as well as in several anthologies.  Her essay “Becoming Shiver-Man,” will appear in a forthcoming  anthology (Poem, Revised) on the vision/revisioning of individual poems.    She’s been awarded two fellowships in poetry from Literary Arts, as well as an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission to work on new manuscripts (Blue Field, Burning and Inter/View); residencies from Soapstone and Caldera; five nominations for Pushcarts; and first prizes in poetry from the National Writers Union, Portland Pen, Americas Review, Red Rock Review, Chaffin Journal, and The Bellingham Review.   Her chapbook, Passion, received the 2000 Oregon Book Award for poetry.  Her first full-length collection, Red Jess, appeared in February 2006.  Her new chapbook, Pulse & Constellation, just appeared from Finishing Line Press.  She holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Syracuse University, and was poet-in-residence at Central Oregon Community College in 2005 - 2006. 

Tarnish:

oxygen’s sly chemistry that kisses
silver a darker shade.  Little piggy,
barely sketched in silver winged ears
and attentive snout, you have bathed all
year in air, yielding to tarnish.  I run
my thumb across your sleek slopes—haunch
and belly chilled by winter’s incursions
at the sill.  O smirched sweet pig, you are
no magic lamp.  No vanished figure
rises to return to me.  But your grim
grimed mask—I cannot watch you blotch
above my desk.  Cool silver better
mirrors sorrow.  I rub and rub your curves. 
My fingertips blacken.  You shine like ice.  

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Copyright 2007, Judith Montgomery.
 All Rights Reserved by Author.