Flowers. Feathers. Fresh fruit.  Bright colors.  Can you tell that spring is approaching? Last month The Slam was dominated by sleet and snow, but this month it seems our winter-weary Slammers are ready to move on to warmer topics.  And who can blame them?  February is a turning point, a capricious sort of month that can offer up alternate servings of sunny hope and slushy despair.  The groundhog makes shadow guesses, the Olympic athletes in Vancouver battle vacillations of rain and fog, snow and sleet.  And here on The Slam, we try to write ourselves into a sunnier mindset, without letting the February chill slip in between the lines.

But this month's Slammers did let the conflicting tones of February slip into their work here and there... and I think that's partly why I like this round of poems and stories so much.  What is a celebration of spring without the remembrance of winter, after all?  The hovering chill only makes the colors warmer; the echo of the winter wind only makes the music more sweet.

"Blue Bonnet Plague" is perhaps the most obvious example of a sunny poem with darker undertones.  Jolina writes of flowers that resemble joyful bells, bees and butterflies that "dance lazily" in the warm spring sunshine. But we know from the grim pun in the poem's title that this is not a simple ode to spring. Rather, Jolina is exploring the irony of wordplay that can turn a terrifying epidemic into a beautiful flower.  Like the seemingly innocent rhyme of "Ring-Around-the-Rosy" – which originally described the "rosy" rash associated with Bubonic plague – the pun "Blue Bonnet Plague" carries complexity beyond the simple meaning of the words.

Soliloquy's "Peacock" offers a similar promise of idyllic beauty, albeit a beauty that is quickly withdrawn from the narrator's reach.  The poem is an amalgam of scintillating language: "exotic ferns and berries," "crystal seed and golden suet," "iridescent feathers."  But all this beauty belongs to a bird in a zoo, blocked off beyond a "lucid partition" from the narrator's touch. This piece beautifully communicates the frustration of knowing that your most desired prize – whether it be a peacock, a lover, or the warmth of spring – remains just out of your reach.  A predicament that nearly everyone can relate to in this month of February.

Many of this month's other Slammables explore these same layers of meaning.  Even moonbird's "Springtime Limerick," the most lighthearted verse in the bunch, acknowledges that the music of spring is always an "intricate riddle." But if we can see the dark undertones of these cheery spring pieces, maybe it can help us to see the bright highlights of this dreary time of year.  Everything has a flip side, a reversible lining, a hint of something else showing through.  Sometimes, as JapaneseWatermelon notes in her poem this month, some people – and experiences – just need to be shifted out of black and white and developed "in color."  As February plods on, let's see how we can develop our perceptions.  And until spring arrives at last, dear Slammers, let's all keep thinking – and writing – on the bright side.

Cheers,

Ann Pedtke
Slam Master