Poem

Map Fragment, on Clay

Who first thought of scratching here and there

on soft clay, instead of only giving

directions, must have wanted to keep close

the shape of all that lay between himself

and someone whose absence turned regular days

and nights into a vast terra incognita, a blank

that his mind filled with terrifying beasts, winged

serpents, who sang of other courses, other

islands, other ways. If he drew the place

he knew, and those distant places he thought

he knew, he could touch the map where she was

and say to himself, without leaving home,

if she is not here, she is there.

— Millard Dunn

Millard Dunn is the author of Places We Could Never Find Alone

Poem

I Swear

This won’t hurt.

I’ll always love you.

You’re perfect.

I do. I will.

I didn’t. It wasn’t —

You’ve got it all wrong.

I only want what’s best for you.

This will be good for both of us.

Nothing can be done.

You’ll never change.

It wasn’t my fault.

I’m only trying to help.

No one’s to blame.

It will be better soon.

— Debra Kaufman

Poem

Beige Wall Telephone, 1960s

Beige Wall Telephone, 1960s

To you who have never known what it is to be tethered

     to the family’s one phone by a corkscrew cord

          filthied by idle fingers twisting it as we talked

and stretched by our efforts to sneak with the handset

away from the dining room where that cheap plastic box

     clung to the wall, my sister and I desperate

          to hide behind curtains or in a nearby room

and mumble dumb endearments to whichever lucky soul

we had a crush on that week: I won’t say how wonderful

     it felt to hear a call’s unexpected tremolo

          and rush to answer that sudden summons,

lifting the receiver’s heavy curve out of its metal hook,

or to dial seven numbers on a whirring analog wheel

     and hear a distant ringing pulse in the ear,

          knowing that actual bells trilled as a body

moved through space to deliver its hopeful Hello? –

no, it was awful, that phone, intended for businesses,

     brisk standing exchanges of information,

          not a home where its too-public anchoring

left adolescent siblings open to each other’s mockery

and the cocked ears of nosy parents straining to decode

     one side of conversations as we curled closer

          to the wall and whispered words downward

into the darkness that our huddling made, not pacing

like a barking dog chained to a stake in the backyard

     but trying our best to vanish, descending

          slow as a diver sipping words like oxygen

from a humming line whose other end kept us breathing.

— Michael McFee, from We Were Once Here,
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017

Poem

Pairing Mantids

He has only one job to do. And she, with her hunger,

her need to feed the future without him by consuming him,

has a lot to get done before winter.

His head tilts slightly, like a sinner at communion,

like a teen expecting his first kiss to be like lightning.

Then his body starts to do the work it was built to do.

She turns toward him and wipes off his face.

He knows it’s all over, but his body keeps on, unknowing itself.

His is the kind of stupid happiness

you can only appreciate at a distance,

the kind you know cannot be as good as it looks.

Hers is the work of duty and a different devotion.

While he takes her from behind, she takes him

head first just like she took a yellow striped hornet

who would have taken her to his own hideaway,

just as she took the grasshopper who was tired of summer,

as she took the large green moth who had no mouth of its own.

She ignored those magnificent wings — just let them fall —

as she ignores the thrusting body that falls away from hers.

He dies two deaths at once, the deaths of love and of life.

But the moment between, the moment before it all ends,

is the moment of his glory and the beginning of her toil.

— Paul Jones

Paul Jones is the author of What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common

Poem

Greyhound

Every year for one summer week we fled city concrete,

our skinned and scarred bony legs climbing steel bus steps.

Our mother shaking her head at the zoomorphic use

of a racing dog she believed was grossly falsified, sighing:

Why they would put a fast dog on this slow-ass bus is beyond me!

The driver collecting tickets always shook his head back,

not for the misleading hound, but the long night ahead —

a sundown that commenced crying fights, the lap feast

of cold fried chicken and bread slices, head balancing acts

of sleep upright. All to get down home, a foothill

in the blue ridge mountains where we stepped off

into a morning and the arms of our grandmother

who’d say: My you’ve grown. How was the ride? Who’d boast

she rode the mule-pulled tractor to the schoolhouse in snow.

— Crystal Simone Smith

(From the book All the Songs We Sing, celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective published by the Blair/Carolina Wren Press.)

Poem

What It Was about that First Marriage

The floors were fine. Gorgeous,

in fact. Blond as sunshine, clean,

polished, alive with the kind of promise

we had dreamed. But oh those two

mismatched tables. Same height,

so we kept trying to line them up

as if they were a unit. One was maple,

right out of somebody’s 1950s Nebraska kitchen, with a scalloped leaf that folded down,

though it was years before we saw it

for what it was. The other, streamlined,

sleek. Once we tried pushing them together

and covering both with a patterned cloth, though dinner guests kept banging their knees. When I look back, I’m amazed

we didn’t toss it, haul it to the curb.

But, no, we struggled for years

to make it work, painting,

and painting again, turning it sideways.

— Dannye Romine Powell

Poem

Worksock

If I could round up stockings

I’d take all the holey ones from Mama’s box of sewings,

My father’s, first, the heel ragged as a monkey’s face.

I’d hang that sock again for him

And pray Santa would put an orange

Or some nuts down in the thin

And frayed toe, then arrange

One real coconut with peeling skinned

Off to let him know

The love he held for me I hold for him.

We were not poor — just didn’t have much money.

Christmas meant longing:

That chance to fill me with sunny

Trances when I would skip the fields

And pray for days that Jesus would not appear.

I was never ready to see Him

Alive instead of in a sermon nailed to a dogwood tree.

Before sunup on Christmas day

The plankhouse hummed with joy.

In my stocking: raisins, a few English walnuts, toy

From a Cracker Jack box I’d run

A store with: I’d “sell” my brother a Mary Jane

From his sock that Mama darned in a ray of sun.

— Shelby Stephenson

Shelby Stephenson was North Carolina Poet Laureate from 2015–2018. His most recent book is More.

Poem

Exulansis

The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it. – The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows 

To my Northern friends: I regret

I can no longer speak with authority

about winter. I’ve forgotten the feeling

of ears ringing with the silence

of fresh snowfall, air so cold it stabs

the lungs. Gone are those Norse names,

the rough wool, heavy boots,

bodies bent against wind so fierce

there must be a name for it in Lakota.

I can’t recall how despair closes in,

a cloud blanket for days, dense, ominous.

Remind me how, in a whiteout,

a person can get lost between car

and house. Tell me about

children in mufflers waiting

for the school bus in handmade huts,

the shush of skis down slushy streets.

Didn’t we find Easter eggs nested

on the icy crust? I do remember

that just when you vow to never

shovel another drive,

the bright flags of daffodils flare. 

— Debra Kaufman

Debra Kaufman’s most recent book is God Shattered

Poem

A Nimble Deer

A doe that was, only a minute

before, quietly munching, leaps over

a wooden fence, nimble

as a goat. She rears up, after reaching

the other side, like a trick dog —

her front hooves dangling from her

useless forelegs, her hind legs

absorbing all the weight. She cranes

her soft, brown neck just far

enough to reach the succulent leaves

of a dogwood tree. But the younger 

deer — smaller, less sure —

stick to low-hanging branches,

their tails flicking like little propellers

that fail to lift them from the earth.

– Terri Kirby Erickson

Poem

In Tune with the Pandemic

When tuning my acoustic guitar,

the oxidized strings having gone

flat in the warm humid air,

the wire being wound to perfect

tension sometimes releases an

almost imperceptible chiming,

a tiny push of air outward,

the string immediately retreating

to form a momentary vacuum,

vibrating faster or slower subject

to the energy expended,

but rising to frequency.

The child in me believes

this spontaneous harmonic

relief is a sympathetic response

to the strings already in timbre,

like voices in a street choir

soaring to a single ethereal note

that might make you weep.

But this is not the case. The string

has merely snagged in the bridge

pin slot or has failed to slide easily

over the nut at the top of the fretboard,

a mechanical glitch that can be

remedied by applying a touch

of graphite from a no. 2 pencil.

So simple. So obvious.

Still I listen for the ping, hold my

breath in expectancy, believing

that believing is as essential

as complete understanding,

that when coaxed to proper pitch

the string will sing out with joy

as the tuner’s circular gear tugs 

perpendicular to the worm gear’s

rotation, the mechanical workings

there to remind me that given enough

time the delicate wire will break

sharply and never ring true again.

— Stephen E. Smith