Lina ramona Vitkauskas is the author of two chapbooks and one poetry book including: THE RANGE OF YOUR AMAZING NOTHING (Ravenna Press, 2010); Failed Star Spawns Planet/Star (dancing girl press, 2006); and Shooting Dead Films with Poets (Fractal Edge Press, 2004). She was recently nominated in early 2009 by Another Chicago Magazine for an Illinois Arts Council Award (in the poetry and fiction categories). She has won an honorable mention in STORY magazine's Carson McCullers Award contest (1999) and placed as a semi-finalist for the Cleveland State University Open Poetry Series (2002). She has an MA in Creative Writing from Wright State University and her work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies including: The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007); The Prague Literary Review, Van Gogh's Ear (Paris); The Chicago Review; Aufgabe; Drunken Boat; MiPoesias, the In Posse Review Multi-Ethnic Anthology edited by Ilya Kaminsky, among many others. For 8 years, she was the co-editor of the online literary magazine, milk magazine; is currently the primary Lithuanian translator for the online international poetry web collection, UniVerse - A United Nations of Poetry; and has read at/in various venues and series in Chicago. Poet Denise Duhamel has noted that Lina's poetry "employs humor and kitsch. Its dazzling underside confronts intolerance and terrorism with a wise brilliance."

PLUMES

"Enceladus is sort of helpfully spewing out its innards"
-Astronomer on the possibility of water on Saturn

She comes to herself in plumes,
like a pliable ring, she becomes a
solitary umbilical of was.
If water is one form of her,
she now retains ice, exact vapors,
each trail a constructed air muzzle
of what could be new. She was invited here,
into spiked silence and in tar, she led
five women to their masked deaths:
word, interpreter, shaman, gypsy,
chanteuse. Each one carrying a candied
criminal in her teeth. Saturnine professora,
your molt is just toolbox wax, your dejection
is a dormant rain. Her ease into nitrogen,
which is garnish to her, shakes her from
these molecules. She greets herself
in the river of less, Turns herself out
the universe: bare, reborn, unearthed.
Each unknown cup of her blood
a clap-red and read.