Poems from the Spring 2019 issue.
I didn’t see the line when I crossed it—
only light, making everything new;
here, they say the winters spill out,
white a boll inside my palm;
here, gold adorns the trees,
the sun sheds its effervescence through the leaves;
I touch the place where the master split my head with iron,
even that imperfection is brilliant here;
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
When it snows, the entire post
shuts down like there is no war
going on. Perhaps the higher-ups
decide to let those left behind,
for the moment, savor the chance
to shape snowmen with their children
or lie beside another warm body.
Probably it is lack of preparedness.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
It rises from dust, rakes in the populace,
feeds them fried Twinkies, fried trees if they could
put them on a stick and powder them in sugar.
Bodies bunch up: the perfumed, the balmy,
the whole way to watch the potter at his wheel,
the carver and his knife, the knee-high rope
around an old America.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
Once, I trusted a hand pointing north;
once, I called for a wolf
and a man walked out of the night.
I walked Youngsville and marked myself down on a map
I was making.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
It’s not what you think, not a back-tease aerosol of a band
head-banging to a half-cracked amp nor the flame-decal of a beater
revving the gravel lot out back, hungry for a big-tiddied girl to stumble
out cork high and bottle deep.
A poem from the North Carolina Music Issue.
My burnt body hangs crisscross over Carolina beach dunes below where
family gathers children’s ringing sand splash toys tangled in teenage lust
the skin consciousness potential of everyone eyeing one another
in sunbursted bottoms there is nothing here but the bliss of this day
& so I think on death hanging out over the Atlantic so many dead
A feature essay from the North Carolina Music Issue.
I wanted to start with the wild weeds and the creaking wood on the front porch, walking up to Nina Simone’s childhood home in Tryon, North Carolina. I wanted to start where she started, imagining her daddy playing jazz standards on the piano, her mama cooking something good and greasy in the cramped kitchen with siblings zooming around. I envisioned myself, like Alice Walker looking for Zora Neale Hurston’s unmarked grave, shouting Nina in the derelict home, hoping somehow she would appear, gloriously phantasmagoric, and answer all of my incessant probing questions.
A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
of a copper-colored river
returns, prefers her wrists
cuffed
by swift currents
rather than caution-stilled
by the many sister-gazes.
A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
A young couple scutters by
On a motorbike. Harley, I think.
On their way to the beach. I can
See his feet are bare, resting inches
From the muffler’s burning heat—oh
The recklessness of young men
That makes them so exciting
To fuck, and sends them off
To war, whistling and marching.
A poem from the Fall 2018 issue.
None of this surprises you now,
does it? I’m not sure I can know that,
I responded to myself.
Or I think I did.
I should have.
A friend told me to embrace
my disorientation here, to attend
to it and dwell in that state, make it
a daily practice, like walking,
like drinking coffee.
