Poetry
She slips it out of its leatherette case,an immaculate cartridgeshe clenches between the red bow of her lipswhile flicking her butane lighter,sucking deeply until the tipstarts to crackle and glow like a fuse. She snaps the lighter shut and blows smokethrough pursed lips over her shoulder,lifting the Lucky between two rednail fingerslike somebody about to »
“He mounted to the bar with a pistol in his hand and he sent Judge Massie to the Promised Land . . .” He mounted to the barwith a pistol in his handand he sent Judge Massieto the Promised Land
“. . . someone picks up a snapshot and says, just before tossing it to oblivion, ‘My god, who are these quaint people?’” Stiffly posed before the forsythia bush, they wearcoats, ties, and bemused faces, as if their mother’sjust called them from the porch, “You boyshold your shoulders back and stand up straight.”
“But here we are. You with a bow and arrow. Me in a headdress.” The Indian Sports Mascot Meets Noble Savage Indian Mascot: I think of us always as a couple. Noble Savage: Have we ever been together? Are we ever going to be?
“There is a land beyond the lands you know . . .” (After reading Hudson’s “Green Mansions”)There is a land beyond the lands you know,Circled by silver veils of woven rainAnd green,clear sunsets with the moon in towAnd woods and dark savannahs of wild grain.
“‘What I wrote seemed to me more essentially myself than anything I did or said.’” During his life and since his death in 1942, many people wanting to understand the American South have looked to William Alexander Percy. Understanding the man, it has seemed, might help us understand the region. Born into a prominent southern »
“The devil was in the grocery store yesterday . . .” The first year of graduate school, it was the questionsthat woke me every night at 3 a.m. When will they figure out I’m an impostor, and I can’t do the work?How do I deal with the students in my own class? What can I do »
Poetry
I didn’t tell the water it was a pitchfork.I believe the water believed it was a tridenton account of the family resemblance.The road had disappeared, the field,the sundial was about to go under, meaning shadowswould have been unable to stay on schedule.When I touched the water with the pitchfork,it stopped rising, and for a week, »
Southern Missouri State University Press, 2006 These are the final lines of Mary Leary’s poem, “New Orleans (Big Stuff),” and they speak well not only for the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, waiting on roofs or in shelters for help during and after the storm, but also for the voices collected here, in Hurricane »
“He crouched in the shade of the barn, thinking and mumbling, and the wind ripped the words from his mouth . . .” LexiconThe people are talking about budworms; they are talkingabout aphids and thrips. Under the bluff at Dismal Rock,there where the spillway foams and simmers,they are fishing and talking about pounds and allotments;they »
“It’s a kind of monster, cobbled from parts of other creatures—” On Being Asked to Pray for a VanMy evangelical brethren have let me know,via the quarterly fundraising letter,that they can’t get the gospel aroundbecause their van has given up the ghost.God in the machine, help them.
Music
Because I know her name fromrock and roll biographiesand the legendary deathof her first husband, becauseI grew up hearing her voiceon my father’s folk records,because I love the mythsthat accompany musicalmost as much as I lovemusic, I should have goneto see her when she was bookedintro the coffeehouse runby a church whose articlesof faith have »