Poet of the Week Archive: March, 2006

March 6 - 12, 2006: Diana Pinckney

Diana Pinckney's friendship and poems have held a place in my life for many years. Being in a workshop group with her has enabled me to follow the process of her writing. She will not settle for less than the exact image or the perfect music to convey emotional intensity. Home and hearth are at the center of her poetry, but so, too, are community and the larger world. She is ever willing to venture beyond familiar territory. You will find her examining pyramids in Egypt and pondering the fox-faced bat in Australia. Always evident is her curiosity about the world, her questioning of how to reconcile historical events with the human heart. In one poem, she remembers what she was doing during the week Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. In another, she quotes what a certain politician has said. The poems turn and turn again as she examines all facets of reasoning until she reaches those last transcendent lines. What seems to guide Diana is her underlying intuition. After all the technical issues are resolved, a certain amount of intuition comes into play. This intuitive nature isn't easy to define or explain but is a gift that aids her in her own work, and in critiquing the work of others. That there is a bit of magic in the poetic process is, perhaps, hinted at in Diana's latest book, Alchemy. In this book the ancient element "fire" appears in several poems. While fire can be a destructive force, it is also what warms us, literally and metaphorically. Such is the depth and power of words in the hands of a poet who can mold them into their many forms. "Love never finishes with us," she writes, and her poems prove to us that it never does.
-- Gail Peck

Gail Peck is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections of poetry. Thirst is her most recent book (Main Street Rag Publishing Company). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Southern Review, Greensboro Review, Cimarron Review, Rattle, Kestrel, Brevity and One Hundred Years of Poetry in North Carolina. She has delivered lectures and conducted workshops for various organizations.

When Only Fans Stirred the Air

We give in, leave our beds at two a.m., hauling quilts
         to the back lawn, the whole family sprawled
                    on wide-bladed Charleston grass that crackles

with June bugs, my mother lamenting
         lost constellations, all of us searching
                    for stars that wouldn't fall, leaving the sky

to a transient moon, the night to the floating ember
         of my father's Lucky Strike, breath rough
                    in his chest, his ruined heart already drowning.

The Mermaid Wishes for a Daughter

Here's the tide, ebbed for you, sponges
                for blisters, fins
                spreading a fan,
                shade from the sun.

Glide with a pelican, take green
                for eyes, wear ropes
                of shells between
                strands of sea oats,

curl in a basket of sweet grass
                that spins, then stops.
                My arms reach down,
                find you in rocks.

The Mermaid's Daughter Wishes for Sunglasses

Ray Bans would be good. Or a ball cap. Anything.
Day and night the waves's slap,
slap. I'd give a size two bikini for some other music
and I don't mean her siren's slow song.
Home sweet home on this rough, hard stone.
Don't get me started on chairs,
Levi's, a few catalogues to flip through.
I know it's sooo off the charts
for her, a mom with, you know,
mobility problems. But let a storm toss a boat
anywhere near and like, quick as an eel,
I'm outa here.

The Mermaid Sings of Sailors

I dreamed of one to carry me inland
to the white picket fence,
lilacs by the door, maybe a pond out back.
Sailors are restless, not rootless -
the dirt under each one's nails

dug from somewhere, each sweet
tongue different and the same.
The last calling me his Lorelei,
bringing a silver mirror,
his black-haired hands

smoothing my red locks.
And when I took him down,
our bodies splashed
by the brimming moon,
I was his one green love

moving to the water's rhythm.
Later, of course, when he left
I blamed my divided nature -
had I been whole, he would've stayed.
A child, I thought, would be mine

the way the sailors never were,
easy promises wrecked on a bloody horizon.
And that desperate wish? Now a daughter
who swims toward the bobbing masts,
legs fluttering on the outgoing current.

Diana Pinckney has published poetry and prose in such journals and magazines as Southern Poetry Review, Cream City Review, Tar River Poetry, Calyx, and Creative Loafing. Her chapbook, Fishing With Tall Women, won North Carolina's Persephone Press Book Award and South Carolina's Kinlock Rivers Memorial Chapbook Contest. Nightshade Press, in Troy, Maine, published her second collection, White Linen. In 2004 Main Street Rag Publishing Company (Charlotte) published her third book, Alchemy, from which the first poem in this sequence was drawn. Ms. Pinckney teaches poetry workshops around the state and has given readings in both Carolinas, including the 2004 Piccolo Spoleto Sundown Series, in Charleston. She teaches poetry writing in the Continuing Education department at Queens University, in Charlotte.

March 13 - 19, 2006: Jonathan Fisher, Irene Harvley-Felder, Gena Smith

What does the future of North Carolina poetry look like? These three young poets will give you a glimpse of it. All three are recent poetry award winners: Jonathan Fisher, who received the yearly poetry award from Duke; Irene Harvely Felder, who won the annual North Carolina State University poetry award last year, a competition that includes poems submitted from all over the state; Gena Smith, a winner of the Phoenix Literary Festival poetry award while a student at High Point University.

I first had the idea for this feature while talking with Jonathan Fisher's mother, a state legislator, during a reception celebrating my appointment as poet laureate last June in Raleigh. Obviously proud of her son, she told me that he had just won the coveted student poetry award at Duke and that his professor was my old friend, James Applewhite. Then in late summer, a young woman named Irene Harvley-Felder contacted me about an interview for Our State. In the course of talking with her, I discovered that she was the very one whose winning poem had so impressed me in the News and Observer's Sunday Journal section a few months before. We simply had to do a feature on our young emerging poets, I decided.

But I wanted a third poet. Where to look? It didn't take long to find her. While visiting High Point University in November for the annual Phoenix Festival, I met Gena Smith, the school's prize poet. She promised to send me some work, and when I read it, I understood why her professors held her in such high regard.

So, here they are, Jonathan, Irene, and Gena. The future of North Carolina poetry looks bright indeed! -Kathryn Stripling Byer

Jonathan Fisher

Even as a freshman, Jonathan Fisher wrote poems like a senior. Here was a good son of North Carolina, at home among the from-everywhere other undergraduates -- a fresh face for southern poetry, a fully up to date young intellectual who retained a feeling for natural beauty and locality. His imagination, even then, had the scope and daring to follow the vortex-like scale regression of chaos theory, to the tiniest fractals of order, in his poem on the Mandelbrot set. We had read James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science, as part of our class Science, Aesthetics, and Poetry. Jonathan was the only student with the originality and candor to grapple with these scroll-like exfoliations from randomness, in a personal, emotive encounter. His dream-like poem combines reason and irrationality, finding in aesthetic form and pleasure a sufficient, rich defense against the unknowable. Now he is a senior, and his work is that of a fully mature original poet. In the poems gathered here, he is devoutly observant in the southern manner, yet wittily metaphoric. Emotion and precision arise together. Compelling details gather, bit by bit, building a language of significant experience. His directness and originality of subject and approach provide haiku-like compression, within an intelligence of great comprehensiveness and power. This poet's mind can shift like the weather, overarching, always new, illuminating some sequence of moments as small and bright as water drops, in a climate of imagination as side and light-filled as a North Carolina mountain horizon. Reading his poems now, one of them for the first time, I feel proud to have helped fuel and encourage a potential I felt in him from the first. I also feel again that a teacher can only discover capability and help a new poet with the confidence to find his or her own way. As is so clearly the case with Jonathan, the gift has to be there already. -- James Applewhite

James Applewhite has taught English literature and creative writing at Duke University since 1972. Duke University Press published his most recent collection, Selected Poems, late last year. Mr. Applewhite's work was featured on this web site in the January edition of "Notable Books by North Carolina Writers"

Poem For Benoit Mandelbrot, A Connoisseur of Chaos

You, who would provide Stevens
With his pages of illustrations,
Are a true connoisseur.

You, who have traced in violent spirals
Of mathematics, the outline
Of nature's all-pervading puzzle,
Are one with your science.

You have charted an ebb and flow
Of numbers so complex as to
Confuse my mind's compass.

And as I spin round and down
Seduced by hope of light
I am engulfed by elegant swells.

I surface again,
Dumbly aware, buoyant
In your heavy chaos.

My limbs flail at the symmetry of your designs
My eyes search the blank horizons
For the pattern of dry sanity.

Briefly I taste the salt sting
Of equations I'll never understand,
But a wave of awe
Sweeps me up as if divine
Artistry had finally
Conformed to a function of
Some rigid geometry.

Can any man be more than an artist?

Geisha Song
after Pinsky's Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Obeisance my roof. When I had
No supper I let men's eyes dine.

When I had no eyes I borrowed
Beauty's eyes. When I had no
Mouth I painted puppet lips.

When my mother embraced me I ran
To my father. When I found
No father I embraced my danna.

When I had no friend I made music
My friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my shrine. I have
No priest, the shamisen is my choir.

When I have no means ceremony
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will bring no ceremony.

Tradition is my trade, pleasure
Is my product. When I had
No master I entertained my dreams.

Jonathan "Fish" Fisher was born in Asheville in 1984 and has called Asheville his home ever since. He is currently finishing up a BA in English with a minor in Linguistics at Duke University. Last year, he was a co-recipient of Duke's Anne Flexner Award for Poetry. He is on the editorial staff of Duke's oldest literary magazine, The Archive, and is a member of the Lucifer Poetics Group. He is interested in east Asian languages and poetry, and he is planning to spend time in Japan after his graduation from Duke in May. His poems have appeared in The Archive, The Displayer, and The Chambers County Review.

Irene Harvley-Felder

Judge of the North Carolina State University Poetry Prize in 2005, I read through many manuscripts before choosing Irene Harvley-Felder's "In Celebration of Death," a poem that, for me, clearly set itself apart from its competitors. Her command of the different elements of the craft somehow convinced me that the poem had to have been written by a practitioner of more than a few years. Imagine my surprise to discover -- when we met in Raleigh at the award festivities -- that she was a recent college graduate. Often the language of poetry tempts the immature into a no-exit hall of mirrors where the self gestures, poses, enacts its various theatrics, and any glimpses of the outside everyday world are purely accidental. Not so with Irene Harvley-Felder, who is far more interested in the richly sensual texture of external reality. She is ever watchful, the careful observer. She notices a dead deer in her neighbor's pick-up truck. She watches the TV news and has heard hum of jet fighters flying low over the coast. She notices that "Outside my house, / the city is cutting down trees to build a road." A poet who acknowledges and celebrates the physical world, she has a gift for making us see it anew. In "Studying a Mosaic in the Haghia Sophia," she writes, "I've rediscovered day, floating / in dust motes . . . " For Irene, the process of poetry seems to be one in which the appearance of things is continuously and miraculously rediscovered, then carefully rearranged and rhythmically transferred to the page. She is fine young poet. -- Peter Makuck

Peter Makuck's stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in The Hudson Review, Poetry and The Sewanee Review. His work was featured on this web site in August. Author of five books of poetry, he has edited Tar River Poetry at East Carolina University for twenty-seven years. Last fall BOA Editions, Ltd., published a new collection of poems, Off Season in the Promised Land. His second short-story collection, Costly Habits (University of Missouri Press, 2002) was nominated for a Pen/Faulkner award. He lives with his wife, Phyllis, on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina's barrier islands.

In Celebration of Death

I have the dream again,
the one about the neighbor's pickup truck,
about the buck half-covered with a blue tarp
and half revealed, its neck blown open
and caked with blood, its eyes more focused
than they should be. On what, I wonder?
The neighbor says, It's killing season,
and I think he must be right.
I've seen the news. I've heard the hum
of the fighter jets flying low toward the coast,
spaced evenly as teeth, and yesterday,
I hit a bird with my car. I watched it glide
down on the wind, saw it roll over twice
in the rearview mirror, wings bent,
useless, and I didn't stop.
I saw it lying in the road until it was only
a black mark, a scab on the landscape.

                                                         In the dream,
my neighbor sharpens his knife on a stone
and the sun is on the blade and almost blinding,
and I wish that I was blind, that I could shut my eyes,
that I wasn't fascinated. I never knew
he was this graceful, my neighbor,
a big man with a solid jaw who moves his arm
like a dancer, the buck's gullet splayed open
from throat to belly in one stroke,
and I have never seen anything so lovely.
When I am awake, I will watch
the bombings on the news,
always at night, darkness
the best backdrop for those fireworks that burst
in celebration of death.

                                 Outside my house,
the city is cutting down trees to build a road.
Uprooted, they lie stacked and silenced
in truck beds, and the deer have nowhere to go.
They've been ambushed, trapped. They're crossing
streets by night, their eyes gleaming
in headlights with something like hope,
they meet the startled gaze
of a driver, they have nothing else
to lose. Their bodies smash into cars, leaving
imprints in their metal frames, glass shards
like puzzle pieces on the pavement.

Studying a Mosaic in the Haghia Sophia

I have a fever and Christ is on the wall.
A moment ago I was climbing the spiraled
stairway in this holy place and there was no light,
so I reached out for something
and met a slab of granite, cold
and impenetrable. I'm fine, I said,
though no one had asked, though the shuffling
of tourist feet had not paused,
and the darkness remained unbroken
but for the flickering whites of eyes.

Still, somehow, I've rediscovered day, floating
in dust motes in the second floor gallery,
it's right there through the windows, right there
where I left it. The tour guide is here,
leaning careless on the railing
in front of the group, sawing away
at my language, filling my head
with broken facts. Over the balcony and down
in the nave are the marble tiles
that have known the pressure
of a thousand knees, the pressure of supplication
and of praise. I will not look up.
I fear the sight of those prayers
caught in the domes like birds
fooled by the transparency of glass.
I can almost hear the beating of their wings,
that empty sound. That sound, like sorrow.

I pretend not to hear it, feigning rapture
in the guide's vast knowledge of dates
and names, of the quality of gold leaf in a mosaic.
I am adept at false tranquility,
so stiff I cannot move -- I've forgotten how --
when a child in front reaches out
to touch what's left of Christ.
I am in that moment now, my breath
trapped in my throat, my words forgotten,
her finger tracing the line where Christ ends
and the gray stone of the wall begins.

Irene Harvley-Felder grew up in Sanford and recently graduated from Elon University with a degree in English. She loves to travel, and in pursuit of that love joined the Peace Corps. She has been in Namibia since November teaching English. In the past, she has studied abroad in London and worked in Istanbul as an au pair. Irene was a finalist in NCSU's 2005 fiction contest and also a finalist for Fourth Genre's second annual Editor's Prize. Her poem "In Celebration of Death" will be published in an upcoming issue of Tar River Poetry. In addition, her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Elon University's literary journal Colonnades, and she has been the recipient of several of Elon's Frederick Hartmann literary contest prizes. She has also published two articles in Our State Magazine: Down Home in North Carolina.

Gena Smith

In the middle of her junior year, Gena Smith came to my office to say she was taking the semester off. "Why?" I asked fatherly, thinking of health or family problems. "I'm going to Guatemala." "Oh, study abroad? "No, I'm just going to help build houses." "What do your parents think about your going alone?" "Hmm, well, they're not thrilled." "You're going to lose a semester!" "Yes, I know."

Gena left High Point University as a December, 2005, graduate in English, telling me she was headed to Chicago hoping to work as a journalist for a Spanish newspaper. As of several weeks ago, I hear the rumor she's in New York studying Italian in order to join the Peace Corps. I've learned not to be surprised any longer, just awed.

Calling her a prize-winning academician, poet, fiction writer, and journalist doesn't quite capture all of Gena. Maybe warrior comes closer, a colleague told me. Yeah, I like that: warrior, so eager to keep going, to know the world good and bad, to actually live it. She's a tough young woman with a heart and a firm spiritual faith who has already traveled to more countries than most of us ever will. She walks modestly and quietly on this earth while making a big noise. You go, girl. And drop me a sonnet, or at least a postcard now and then. -- John Moehlmann

John Moehlmann, Professor of English at High Point University, was advisor to Gena Smith for about five minutes per semester. He was honored last year by the Department of English during its annual Phoenix Literary Festival by having an award named after him to be given each year to a deserving High Point University creative writer. The first recipient was Gena Smith.

Brown Skin

Your brown hand I held in my palm
Coffee eyes peering into mine
The tight curls on your negro scalp,
A whisper from the God of time.

Lips right off an artist's easel -
Same color as your mother's palm
A brown much darker than my own
You fell asleep in these white arms.

With eyes so big, a mind so young,
I, the stranger, held your head,
Color of skin matters not to you -
A mother's smile on a river bed.

Funshi

Off to work with a plastic bag as your briefcase
Gripped by your blackened fingernails, it's time to go.
The sun shines heavy, but it always does that here,
Shanghai - city of trade and money and garbage.

Tattered black pants and a soiled cream shirt
The perfect outfit for your grocery store -
As you reach in, your hands become your eyes,
Focused on finding anything solid.

Your old eyes disregard the lives of passersby:
A woman in stilletos barely looks at you
You take no notice of her clanging shoes, nor of
The frumpy woman in ankle-high pantyhose.

Your hand returns from out of the shadows
Like a submarine that's finished its work.
Next, the corner of Mao Ming and Funshi
A new, four foot food store - lunch might be there.

Gena Smith is a recent graduate of High Point University. She majored in English-Writing and double minored in Spanish and Political Science. She was a staff writer for the HPU Chronicle and won awards for her fiction and poetry in at the Phoenix Literary Festivals from 2003 to 2005. Gena hopes to be an international journalist and teach English in South America.

March 20 - 26, 2006: L.B. Green, Steven Lautermilch, Glenis Redmond

The North Carolina Art Council began offering fellowships to writers in 1981. That first year we were able to grant $5,000 to the novelist Angela Davis-Gardner of Raleigh and the poet Paul Jones, a resident of Durham at the time who now lives in Chapel Hill. As of this year, we have been able to help 174 North Carolina-based writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and literary translation and thirty playwrights and screenwriters with fellowships and other grants totaling more than $1.2 million. We make these grants because we know that when North Carolina's writers tell their stories, they help all of us to a better understanding of our culture, our values, and our own hearts.

The writers whose poems appear here -- all of whom received fellowships from the Council this year -- join an august company that includes such writers as Betty Adcock, James Applewhite, Marianne Gingher, Michael McFee, Michael Parker, Daniel Wallace, and Carole Boston Weatherford. Early in their careers, these writers used the Council's fellowships to work on books that helped to establish their reputations in the world of letters. Another early fellowship recipient (1986-1987) was Kathryn Stripling Byer, who is now our state poet laureate. In 1997, the fellowship for Charles Frazier, author of the novel Cold Mountain, was awarded just at the point when he no longer needed the grant. His donation of his fellowship that year was the seed money that allowed the Council to underwrite the public activities of Ms. Byer's predecessor in the office of poet laureate, Fred Chappell -- a tradition that we have been glad to continue ever since.

We're proud to have this chance to present the work of the three poets who received fellowships from the Council for this year: L.B. Green of Davidson, Steven Lautermilch of Kill Devil Hills, and Glenis Redmond of Asheville. We're equally proud of the nine others whose work earned them literary fellowships this year, all writers to watch: Sherry Austin (nonfiction; Flat Rock), Charisse Coleman (nonfiction; Durham), Kelly Gay (screenwriter; Holly Springs), Aaron Gwyn (fiction; Charlotte), Vishal Khanna (fiction; Winston-Salem), Mark Perry (playwright; Carrboro), Jeffrey Stacy (screenwriter; Mount Holly), Adam Sobsey (playwright; Durham), and Lisa Wieland (fiction; Arapahoe). -- Mary Regan

Mary Regan is the executive director of the North Carolina Arts Council.

L.B. Green

Now
        History is as light as individual human life. . . .
                                                       Milan Kundera

The snow falls
On two lovers. So

Entwined their hair
And eyebrows a cloche

Of diamonds. They rouse
From sleep. They kiss.

They wade the deep drifts
That lead to morning.

The plain before them---
For now---

Track-bare,
Snow-bright, and alert.

Judas Trees North of the House

     Red-violet buds:
a sight
      no density of woods
can mute
       in early April each year:
among the trees,
        their color
pervading the smallest spaces
        between gray trunks
and branches
         and hushing all fear
of the wrong
        I've done
and will do.

Entourage

The autumn my father's father decided
to leave this world on his own terms, my
father focused on birds--on wing and nib.
With his hands cupped to his mouth,

he stood so long by the hickories, I thought
he'd weep aloud, instead, mimicked
the grouse, at times, the wild turkey. When,
all the while listening for an answer, he pointed

to the frog, size and color of a penny, that napped
on the lightning-scarred oak, to nuthatches,
zigzagging, in search of louse and weevil.
To eagle, and dove. Once, to three crows,

as dark as our grief, that sat atop the wire.
To hawk and geese, that would--in the rakish
silence, and with the willful flap of their wings--
trap a portion of the sky, then soar.

After Studying Matisse's Pianist and Checker Players, at Midnight

A distinct hum emerges from the line drawn, from
the simple gesture of paint. Here, for example, where
Matisse once laid the woman's fingertip on an ivory key,

and, the resonant shadow, on the table, shed by a bowl
full of pears. It is the same for Picasso's line drawing
of Apollinaire, his friend's forearm to drape affectionately

over the chair in afternoon. Through the night
the hum presses itself against sleep. Peeling, slicing
a kiwi wafer-thin the next morning, you experience

a brightness, innocent, and in wedges, at the fruit's
center. The compelling darkness of the seeds that push
forward into the green. Then a tightening in the chest,

a slight dizziness, when all along you thought you'd handled
the news that arrived five days before, news
of the death of a long-time friend. A friend your own age,

from the home place. That kind of news to register
in the body, as well as the soul, so that you walk out
to the studio, draw more lines to leap and connect.

L. B. Green is a writer, poet, visual artist, wife, and mother who, through her art, remains interested in the lives of women everywhere. Last year in the Kenyon Review's Summer Program for Writers, and while at work on her manuscript Lilas et la Lame, she studied with the Paris Review poetry editor and fellow Meghan O'Rourke and The Kenyon Review poetry editor David Baker. She submitted poems drawn from Lilas et la Lame (including "Now," which appears here) with her application for a North Carolina Arts Council writers' fellowship. An essayist and columnist, as well, her work has appeared in the Charlotte Observer, the Lake Norman Times, and in various journals including the Southern Review, Cold Mountain Review, Rhino, Rattle, The Penwood Review, Earth and Soul: An Anthology of North Carolina Poetry, Main Street Rag, Iodine: A Journal of Poetry, Crucible, The Asheville Poetry Review, Now and Then, and Lifeboat: A Journal of Memoir. In 2003 her poetry chapbook, Judas Trees North of the House, was published as the winner of the Randall Jarrell Harperprints competition administered annually by the North Carolina Writers' Network. The final three poems that appear here were first published in that chapbook. She lives with her husband in Davidson.

Steven Lautermilch

Sleeping in the Mark Twain National Forest

I made camp in your forest last night, Mr. Clemens.
Like your pen name, at best an artful dodge, pure Sawyer and Finn.
At worst a sheer counterfeit, an imposture, a sleight of hand.

Around midnight, maybe later, when I woke to stand
under the pines, the lake a fathom of misty light
swaddling a fathom of heavens.

When along the path, losing my balance,
I saw the ground beneath my feet suddenly lift and turn,
gather form and like a ribbon of vapor moving under a keel

become a slow cloud of white, a small white billowing swirl
that was watching me, the pupil of the nimbus like the eye of a cat,
the iris pointed, the yellow dagger of a blade.

Till glowing like an ember, a spark thrown from a fire, the eye
of the cloud blinked hot white and closed
like banked flame.

The cold that crept down my neck made a nest in my blood.
Coils there still, deep in the hollow of the bones,
amorphous as a corona of stars, shards of the moon,

foam on a dark sea. I have no names for what I felt, only
a presence that opened and flowed, a sluice, a spillway of light,
making a night of names, letting the larger, other, older night pour in.

Pool

Rise and fall, swell and subside, waves of flame
in a looking glass.
Float and drift and stall, gulls and clouds like flowers,
the petals and leaves of sky.

More rock than water, more fire
than air,
in the half moon of a battered shell
you can find her washing, maybe a glimpse of her face.

Walk the beach, follow the swells, you can see her handiwork.
Like a hand of the wind
she comes and goes with a brush, feathering
dark to light.

With a wet brush she works the canvas,
then with the dry bristles
shapes
a detail to form.

Basalt at a cliff base,
one cup after another,
holding its measure of water,
the many-footed tide running out.

Among anemones, the rose petals of lichen,
the tendrils of a star bed of moss -
the underwater galaxy where
again, and then again, comets trail the glimmer of a form.

All along the shore, the ambiguous alphabet of the coast.
In hollow and cranny and cove, where
the trunks and limbs
of sculpted trees lie scattered in a graveyard of bones,

like strokes of ancient calligraphy, the weather-bleached
scroll of shale and salt,
you can hear her whispering, fingering the stones,
the shells, the bones, talking to herself,

casting and reading her runes.

A poet and photographer, Steven Lautermilch has traveled in the far west for the past seven years, exploring the sites of ancient cultures. A selection of poems from the western work received a Pablo Neruda Prize in the Nimrod/Hardman awards given by the University of Tulsa. Mirror Light, his most recent chapbook of poems, appeared in 2005 from Pudding House. Solo exhibitions of his photographs have been held at the Glenn Eure Gallery in Nags Head, the Main Lobby Gallery of the Duke University Medical Clinic in Durham, and the Getchell Library Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno. A new show of photographs is scheduled for this summer at the Festival Park Gallery on Roanoke Island. Steve lives on the Outer Banks where he offers workshops in dream study, meditation, and writing.

Glenis Redmond

Birthright

Daddy soldiered
and like many military men
back then lived on base in barracks.
Lost without the fold of family
he requested weekend leave.
One January Friday
after pocketing his pass
he lit down Highway 26
Sumter to Greenville,
South Carolina to home.

Commander summoned
him Monday morning
about who knows what.
On a hunch he pulls out the pass,
Sinks when he reads the large letters,
LEAVE DENIED.
He explains later much later.
Tells the story in my thirties
of my weekend conception
on his inadvertent AWOL,
his planting a seed, me
defying authority ever since.

Lineage

King steps out of the shadow of Lincoln
poised front and center on the stage in the 1963 August light,
among the throngs of 250,000 he is rooted to his own destiny.
His countenance spinning from the simple truths of Gandhi's loom,
his words soaked in deep meditation of Thoreau's pond,
his feet planted rock firm from following his father's gospel cadence.
His langauage wrapped eloquently in poetry as he speaks of America's
failed attempts.
He stamps the promissary note of the Emanicipation Proclamation with
two words,
Insufficent Funds.

He is only one of many on the mall that day.
Calling out for freedom during those auspicious hours
marked as the beginning not the end.
He places his finger precisely on a touchstone,
our chests worn-out in the heaving.

With my hand placed on my breast I think,
where are the women? None front and center.
Those women with tired hands and calloused dreams
stand firmly monumentally at my back,
while sitting deep at my core.

I dream a dream too, not just a dream speaking,
of the red hills of Georgia and the son of former slaves
and sons of former slave owners
sitting down together at the table of brotherhood.
I dream of women who have brought those brotherhoods into being.

I think of my mother the day before King's address,
laying down in Sumter, South Carolina on Shaw Air Force Base,
flat on her back in the delivery room.
Her body big with blood coursing,
bringing life into life.
Her legs parted ready for a crowning.

On August 27, 1963 at 3:59 AM
my mother's prize of the eye was me.
I center her world, she centers mine.

Women center the world in spirals,
round tables balancing, bearing and holding fruit.
My mind is resting on women, all women.
Women giving birth to babies, especially girl babies
entering the world during the gloaming of King's speech
and I wonder will they be initiated into silence,
trained to be quiet as moths?
Like those women toiling in the fields next to men.
Those women who've gone out back deliberately twisted
and wrung chicken necks, not afraid of blood,
those digging potatoes from deep red clay ground,
those sitting on porches with two bowls to shell peas,
those stripping the pale hair of the yellow corn.
Those women stepping out of sun heated fields,
washing the salty sweat from their darkened skin.
Them dressing their tiredness up in the presentable,
preparing and seasoning meals with the salt and pepper shaker,
then adding the green vinegary taste of chow chow on the side.
These women attending to forks, spoons, plates and napkins;
gleaning from their mamas and their mama's mama

These women: Alberta, Coretta,
Etta, Eula, Bessie Mae, Hattie, Thelma
Louvenia, Corinne, Basheba, Bethula,
Ruby, Lila Beth, Doretha, Lucinda,
Ida Mae, Ettie Pearl, Geneva, Flora,
Bessie, Flossie, Cora, Lettie, Dora Mae,
Hester, Viola, Queenie, Lucille, Molly,
Corenthia, Fannie Lou, Liza, Harriet,
Katie, Sadie, and Jeanette.
Those women setting dreams.
Laying the tablecloth,
lighting candles for my dreams.
Those women.
Them.

Plaster, wood, mortar, brick and stone,
street name and street number
do not hold what is dear
nor make home.
Everyone deserves a pleasant place to dwell,
a front door beckoning possibilities
wide open with winged welcome
presenting the familiar,
of warm kitchen talk poured generously
over Sunday morning brunch,
filling the house with golden rays
spilling hope through eastern windows
where the sanctity of bedroom dreams
wander all about the house
shape-shifting into comfortable couch-like embraces
and the Spirit shaped and stirred
by what is built by heart:
dreams, conversations,
laughter, hugs, and good meals,
all beauties no floorplan or blueprint can render,
sacred architecture sketched
in everyday freehand
of creating home.

Glenis Redmond is an award-winning performance poet, praise poet, teacher, and writer. For the past twelve years, she has traveled both domestically and abroad, performing and teaching. Her poetry won the Carrie McCray literary award and she is also a two-time recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has been published in numerous literary journals and publications including Stanford University's Black Arts Ouarterly, Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review, Emrys Journal, Bum Rush, The Page: Def Poetry Jam, and African Voices.