POET OF THE DAY: Holly Iglesias

Holly Iglesias is the author of Souvenirs of a Shrunken World (Kore Press), a collection of poems focused on the 1904 World’s Fair, and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (Quale Press). She teaches at the University of North Carolina -Asheville and has received fellowships from the National endowment for the Arts, North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her new book, Angles of Approach, was recently published in the Marie Alexander Poetry Series.

Marie Alexander Poetry Series:
Founded in 1996 by Robert Alexander, the Marie Alexander Poetry Series is dedicated to promoting the appreciation, enjoyment, and understanding of American prose poetry. Currently an imprint of White Pine Press, the series publishes one to two books annually. These are typically single-author collections of short prose pieces, sometimes interwoven with lineated sections, and an occasional anthology demonstrating the historical or international context within which American poetry exists. It is our mission to publish the very best contemporary prose poetry and to carry the rich tradition of this hybrid form on into the 21st century.

PROJECTOR

Motor whirring, screen emitting a smell like floor wax, Brother’s fist in front of the lens, blotting out Aunt Ruth’s head as she extends the pickle dish for the camera to see. Dust in the tube of light, antic as 8 mm film.

Children in the dark, untouched by war and all the parents know but never say. They stare at the rush of images—birthday cakes, Mother’s prize roses, a red Schwinn—jittery icons to comfort them in some future Babylon.

SERMONETTE

This morning I take as my text the third book of Ralph, where we learn of his wanderings and the conversation with demons on the open road that led to his first conversion—yes, his first, for there were to be many more, and yes again, because for him conversation was The Way, not the books by which we remember him, those most silent of conversations, but the garrulous meander that flowed so easily in the presence of strangers, that river of words with no apparent source which was—amen—the route to redemption as surely as Paul’s fall from his horse or Thomas’s probe of the Most Precious Wound.

SAINT OF SHENANIGANS

On the lip of dark ages, a canker, a queen of deceit, her felicitous tongue but babble to boys fattened on empire. Fidgety quick, she feeds a hem inch by inch to the ravenous needle, hair littered with pins and lint, shirtwaist crusted with starch for modesty's sake. The sass of that girl, a mouth that won't quit. Barbarians, the lot of them, filthy Harps, always drunk or saying their beads.

Oh Bridget, we pray ye, spare us the Know-nothings, their nativist spleen. Grant us patience to soothe the rage-racked heart.

POET OF THE DAY: Rosemary Rhodes Royston

Rosemary Royston lives in northeast Georgia and has been active in Netwest (NC Writers Network West) for years. She now serves as Program Coordinator for the organization. Her poetry has been published in The Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, and is forthcoming in Literal Latte and online at Dark Sky Magazine and Public Republic. She is the recipient of the 2010 Literal Latte Food Verse Award, and in 2004 she placed first and third in poetry, Porter Fleming Literary Contest. Rosemary has taught poetry courses at the Institute for Continuing Learning at Young Harris College, and she holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University.

Neighbor Lady

She has made them beds.

Beds of hay sporadically placed

in the ragged green pasture.

Pallets, really. Some say

she once lived north of here

had a high falutin’, high payin’ job.

Now she wears yellow rubber gloves,

like the ones I wear to clean the bathroom,

and there’s a turban of sorts on her head.

They say she’s the richest lady in the county.

Sometimes on a soft summer’s night

I see her truck on the property line

and in the air I can feel her presence

as she soothes those she loves so much.

She has spoken to me once: One cow

is worth ten good neighbors.

The Possibility of Snow

Ms. Callie is like a perfumed sparrow,

tiny and fragile in dress slacks,

the seam straight and pressed,

her sweater a matching shade of green.

When I hug her hello I’m afraid she will topple

under the weight of my slender arms.

At 80 her hair is coiffed and teased

and she’s just short of five feet,

only a head taller than my son, Luke.

We are visiting Angie, her daughter, (my friend)

and after talking and laughing over Oolong tea

we realize that my 7-year old has vanished—

he’s not in the guest room with the TV,

nor is he chasing the many cats around the house.

His drawing pad lies abandoned on the floor.

In the distance we hear a soft song of sorts

and are drawn to it, only to find him

on Ms. Callie’s bed, stretched out,

his head propped against the footboard,

conversing with her on the possibility of snow.

Dogwood Winter

Ants raid the bath, wasps claim the washroom,

even as the cool of winter looms.

The forsythia sings against a chorus

of green, yet the hue of winter looms.

The bunting’s a blur of vibrant blue,

off-setting winter’s gray loom.

Calves nurse in the open field, chilled

as the nip of winter looms.

Blood buds of azaleas burst forth

even though winter looms.

The creek hums a rain-filled song,

oblivious to the winter that looms.

Rosemary, thyme, and sage grow

in the sunroom, even as winter looms.

POET OF THE DAY: Linda Parsons Marion

Linda Parsons Marion has been a friend for many years, though I see her rarely. Her new book titled BOUND has just been published by Wind Publications, Charlie Hughes's fine press in Kentucky. Linda's poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Cornbread Nation 2, Negative Capability, Nimrod, Potomac Review, CALYX, Helicon Nine, Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, among others. Her work was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize, and she has received two literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, among other awards. Essays and poems have also appeared in The Movable Nest (Helicon Nine Editions, 2007), Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia(University Press of Kentucky, 2003), Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry (University of Tennessee Press, 2002), Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (University of Georgia Press, 1999) and The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia. She lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion.

(Cover art by Suzanne Stryk)

Birthmark

High on her luscious thigh, we point
to the map of our corner of the universe.
Faint and violet, a nebula yet unprobed
by the world’s curiosities, we are drawn
to its small burst, star rising in the east.
We’d lasso it to earth if we could, fall
prostrate in awe, shouting glory, revolve
elliptical around the blue-hot core, let brilliance
shoot from our fingertips. Now she crawls
out of reach, xylophone and spinning top
her planets to conquer with flags of grasp
and drool. When her legs lengthen, taper
to womanhood, will this constellation fade,
our worship unmarked, will our wanting hearts
look up and remember this brief heaven?

Sprout

The gardener I never reckoned on, she sows
with the fire of a zealot—rows cowlicked
in garlic, snow peas fence-latticed, mounds
studded gold—my daughter bends to earth’s
pure bidding. She’s living up to her baby name,
called Tater for the sun-brown quickness on nose
and arms. She means to mine these coffers
for yields unborn, sequin the counter with
a gracious plenty. Her reach is the surest we know,
to feed and be sated, even as she nurses
a sprout on her belly’s milk, all of us waiting
for the fruit made flesh, for the muskmelon
to twirl its sweet mouth in pearlized clay
yearning toward first harvest.

POET OF THE DAY: Robert West

"It's remarkable how often the national poetry establishment fails to celebrate the many fine southern poets writing today. Our poets win an oddly small number of major literary awards, and they appear in far too few anthologies of national scope. " How could I not be partial to a poet who at the beginning of a review in a major Southern literary journal states precisely what I've been thinking? I've known Robert West since the days when he was editor The Carolina Quarterly at UNC-CH, where he received his PhD. He now teaches at Mississippi State University, though I'm hoping he will return eventually to his native state one of these days.

He's one of the sharpest critics around, and to add to his luster, he is a native of the western NC mountains. As if he needed any more luster, I'll polish off his biography by saying that he's also a poet, a widely published one-- the author of two poetry chapbooks: Best Company (2005) and Out of Hand (2007)--with a third due soon from Finishing Line Press. The poems below are from that forthcoming collection.

The Owl

after Apollinaire

My heart’s an owl nailed down, then freed,

then nailed again. Too spent to bleed,

it hardly feels a thing these days.

All those who love me win my praise.

Point Taken

If acting like a child could keep me young,

I’d look and feel much better than I do:

a logic I can laugh at now once stung

because I caught the drift of it from you.

Union

We make such us of you and me

as can’t define or trace the tie

between the two we used to be:

that compound subject, you and I.

Aubade

A gray

morning

like this

is

good only

for

going back

to

bed with

you

so far

away.

POET OF THE DAY: Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux now lives in Raleigh, NC, where she teaches writing in the NC State graduate writing program. Her most recent book, The Book of Men, was published by WW Norton. Go to her website to find out about her many events and projects.

Smoke

Who would want to give it up,

the coala cat's eye in the dark room, no one there

but you and your smoke, the window

cracked to street sounds, the distant cries

of living things. Alone, you are almost

safe, smoke slipping out between the sill

and the glass, sucked into the night

you don't dare enter, its eyes drunk

and swimming with stars. Somewhere

a Dumpster is ratcheted open by the claws

of a black machine. All down the block

something inside you opens and shuts.

Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze,

trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.

You don't flip on the TV or the radio, they

might muffle the sound of car engines

backfiring, and in the silence between,

streetlights twitching from green to red, scoff

of footsteps, the rasp of breath, your own,

growing lighter and lighter as you inhale.

There's no music for this scarf of smoke

wrapped around your shoulders, its finger

scrawling the pale stem of your neck,

no song light enough, liquid enough,

that climbs high enough before it thins

and disappears. Death's shovel scrapes

the sidewalk, critches across the man-made

cracks, slides on grease into rain-filled gutters,

digs its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves.

You can hear him weaving his way

down the street, sloshed on the last breath

he swirled past his teeth before swallowing:

breath of the cat kicked to the curb, a woman's

sharp gasp, lung-filled wail of the shaken child.

You can't put it out, can't stamp out the light

and let the night enter you, let it burrow through

your infinite passages. So you listen and listen

and smoke and give thanks, suck deep

with the grace of the living, blowing halos

and nooses and zeros and rings, the blue chains

linking around your head. Then you pull it in

again, the vein-colored smoke,

and blow it up toward a ceiling you can't see

where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold,

like the ghost the night will become.

POET OF THE DAY: Evie Shockley

I still consider Evie Shockley a North Carolina poet, even though she was born in Tennessee and now teaches at Rutgers. She has strong ties to our state, having taught at Wake Forest University for a number of years and being involved in the Carolina African-American Writers Collective. I came to know her and her work during my stint as Poet Laureate, and she has been one of my favorites ever since.

Evie is the author of four collections of poetry: the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks. Her study Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She co-edits the poetry journal jubilat and is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing. The following poem is from her new collection, just out from Wesleyan University Press.

my last modernist poem, #4

(or, re-re-birth of a nation)

a clean-cut man brings a brown blackness

to a dream-carved, unprecedented

place. some see in this the end of race,

like the end of a race that begins

with a gun: a finish(ed) line we might

finally limp across. for others,

this miracle marks an end like year’s

end, the kind that whips around again

and again: an end that is chilling,

with a lethal spring coiled in the snow.

___________________________________________

ask lazarus about miracles:

the hard part comes afterwards. he stepped

into the reconstruction of his

life, knowing what would come, but not how.

Poet of the Day: Terri Kirby Erickson

Terri Kirby Erickson's new book of poetry, In the Palms of Angels, has just appeared from Press 53. The following two poems are from this collection, and their quality of quiet attention and recollection can be found in all the poems between its covers.

Terri is the author of two other collections of poetry, Thread Count (2006), and Telling Tales of Dusk (2009, Press 53).

Terri's work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals, anthologies and other publications, including: A Prairie Journal, Basilica Review, Bay Leaves, Blue Fifth Review, Broad River Review, Christian Science Monitor, Cowboypoetry.com, Dead Mule, Eclectica, Foundling Review, Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities; Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Literary Mama, Long Story Short, Muse India, Nibble, North Carolina Literary Review, Oak Bend Review, Parent:Wise Austin, Paris Voice, Pinesong, and Pisgah Review, among others.

BOOGIE-WOOGIE

Nobody taught our father to play,

but he could crank out a boogie-woogie

beat on his sister's piano,

fingers bouncing on the keys like ten

happy children, feet tapping—

smiling

like he never did before he left for work

or came home, tired. He'd collapse

on the couch,

loosen his belt—become so still

in sleep, you'd think

he wasn't breathing. But Dad could fly

across a keyboard—his body so light,

we put our hands on his shoulders

to keep him on the ground.

sponge bath

Draped in towels,

my grandmother sits in a hard -backed

chair, a white bowl

of soapy water on the floor.

She lifts her frail arm, then rests it,

gratefully, in her daughter's palm.

Gliding a wet

washclogh, my mother's hand becomes a

cloud, and every bruise, a rain-drenched

flower.