photo by Tom Wilson

Poet of the Week
August 8-14, 2005: Keith Flynn

Keith Flynn is what Kris Kristofferson once called Johnny Cash – "a walking contradiction." Here is a country boy from western North Carolina whose poetic influences are just as often European as American, a poet who can write a poem for David Allen Coe and another one for Claude Monet, give a poem a title as earthy as "Granny Grunt" or as intellectual as "The Fatigue Of Post-Modern Irony." These contradictions are reconciled in Keith's art, and it is this synthesis that makes his poetry so striking. Distinctions of high and low culture are overwhelmed by the poet's ability to take everything he comes in contact with and make it art. In Louis Simpson's poem "American Poetry," Simpson states: "Whatever it is, it must have/ A stomach that can digest/ Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems." There is no better description that I know of to describe Keith's poetry. —Ron Rash

Ron Rash teaches English and Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University, in Cullowhee. His fiction has won the 1987 General Electric Younger Writers Award, the 1996 Sherwood Anderson Prize, and the 2004 O. Henry Short Story Prize. In 1994 he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of seven books—most recently Saints at the River (2004).

String Theory:
The Violinist In Her Window

After the sake and plum wine,
After the breaded tenderloin
And walk along the Charles River,
Beneath museums of industry
And restored mill town chimneys
And paddling yuppies with their
Fiberglass sculls, we allowed
Rhetorical discussions of elongated
Vowels, the sushi crumbling onto
The rice paper's pink pagodas
And my mind was lifted from
Its stirrups. I saw the violinist
At her window in Waltham,
Naked from behind, and defenseless
Against the sky, save for her face
Ecstatically laying on the heel
Of her wooden puppet, gut strings
Ringing tumult and triangulation,
As the player's clay cheeks flattened
And flinched, her floss flogging
The angry air. In a toss, the house
And its window were dispossessed,
Her long blonde hair casting a shadow,
Like a dove crossing over from another
Flood, wiggling with its own life.
She and I became an immense minority,
Like Achilles face to face with Priam,
Poured down into his bowl of mercy,
And the violinist turned in time to catch
The cabaret girls on the storefront,
Like night swallows dipping into their
Neon Apache dances. It is always easier
To be someone else, to feel pity by
Careful observance of a human face,
But the violinist in her window
Was too far away; so I stood in that
Braid of time with my bandaged soul,
Staring at a fishbowl of gardenias
Atop the delicately scented curly maple
Tables, and imagined the wood smell
Her temples made, my senses colonized
By all the unexplored sensations,
Life's unrolling series of limbic
Miscalculations. The violinist
Suddenly stopped sawing, paused
To look down upon the city's skin
And consider which key to choose
In her antediluvian drift, beneath
The heavy ice floe of thought,
Her fingers on the window
Like shadows of birds, the river
A silver ribbon catching the fish
That curled into parenthesis.
Her strings began to glow as they
Were traversed again, their present
The only way the past has to be
Delivered, contending by geological
Consent, not allowing the light
To wash over them, but changing
To light in the wash, at one
With her worry and its hurried
Intervals, knowing that wherever
The light is touched,
Everywhere touches back.


The Piano Lesson

Down the long shaft of cool concrete
The student advances his vanilla mind.
Before him the hulking machine sleeps
Beneath an immense red mirror occupied
By molecules bouncing one into the other

Like goldfish. Sensing him the dark wood
Huffs and the silver streamers swim into
Position. The teacher readies her ruler,
The cookie on her lips balancing a cigarette.
The test, during which smoke parallels

The baton, beats upon the young man's fingers
Until the pyramid metronome looms above him
Like a skyscraper clock. His red-haired mentor
Puffs and bellows beside him, gripping her ruler
Like a joystick, cologne and nicotine seeping

In equal measure down the pendulum of her spine.
The tadpole notes scramble on clotheslines like
Beads in an abacus, The count, the count, upon
His toes, his tectonic knuckles holding fast to
The ivory teeth of the great mahogany dragon,

Heaving and breathing its tarred and terrible
Arpeggios. The student wedges his escape on
One side of his brain, opposite the hiss of red
Seamed lips. On his test score, one eye lost to
The tempest, fills with pity and drips.


Hitler's Yacht In America

Here again, in praise of shadows,
Sharpened by desire's dependable cycles.

Less certain that the night will end,
Can we bear the coming cold wind's

Sanctuary, fearing love because it is blind;
Or its blind spot become a beacon

Of desperation, renewing the shadow
As it grows? Solitude is a paradox,

Forced or unforced, like nudity with its
Uniform armor, made into pornography

By those most familiar with its prisons.
Lately America says nothing about the size

Of her ideas; DC has its head down,
Pressed upon by snipers firing from the

Trunks of cars, and there are no paddleboats
Slapping down the Potomac beneath cherry

Trees weeping white blossoms, only timeless
Incantations of glory that worry war forward.

Every pain has a story, and little subjectivity.
Memories of haywire systems muddle human

Endurance in the middle of everywhere.
Turning upon these spoked changes

In a court of birds, the bug has no case.
Due process is lost in the cowboy way.

Never think of a leader as a tree
Whose shade you can rest in, or

Equate your worth to the State
In the context of sweat equity.

The voter's tarantella is a swirl of buyer's remorse,
Too much Pluribus and not enough Unum, and the

Music begins where faith and reason leave off, 
Not omerta or duende, rising in their spotted coffins, 
  
Or the viola oblongata of the mind 
In transitory conjecture, but coddled 
  
With personalities sprinkled in the mix and moral 
Authority becomes a baton passed betwixt 
  
Temporary ships adrift in a sea of loathing, following 
A shadow government broken from its mooring. 

When Hitler's yacht was brought to America
There were those inclined to break it apart

And sell the splinters to curiosity-seekers,
Moribund or morbid, to feel the countertop

Where Eva Braun's bare tush had shifted
While the Fuhrer lashed himself, literal

And figurative, to the airtight mast.
Others wanted to let loose the rope and let

It drift out to the deep, out of view, left
To the natural destructive elements where

Fate's hand waves the wand and no indiscriminate
Slaughter is ever detected on the media's halcyon radar.


The Secret War Of Art
          (for Robert West)

We will never be ready for it
When it comes. My first gig
I sat on the front pew
At the funeral of a man
I barely knew, the details

Are vague as the sun, his face,
What can I say, mother paid me
25 bucks to sing Amazing Grace.
The secret war of art, more flames.
Falling in love with cool mountain

Music, America's periodic flirtation
With bluegrass has stirred Ralph
Stanley from his death march
And he sang to us what lay
Ahead, in broken tones, his voice

Full of rock clefts and
Sheer cliff shimmy holes,
The dead lift spared over
For another year. The aesthetics
Of improvisation cannot be

Practiced. Before is over
And performance is now.
There is no blueprint or
Mirror, no body clock to
Measure the centrifugal

Force and uncertain ratios
Of Art. It cannot be eaten
Or taxed, this mad culpable
Need to see an audience sweat,
Like Miles struggling to regain

His voice as his embouchure
Atrophied, or Chet, with his teeth
Beaten out, or Beethoven molding
Notes as the wind tunnel closed
Around him. Finding your own

Story is like trying to change a tire
Underwater, a stubbed-toe sort of cry,
An emergency, like being forced
At gunpoint to compose the melody
Of your life. We need to put everything

In, singing or making love, like Art
Tatum played piano, hard, fast, and
Unusual, with all virtuosity pushed
Into the reckless transitions from
Bridge to chorus, scorched earth

Harmonies and family secrets,
Mutability, the constant consolation.
Art is tropism, flattening the artificial
Paradise and cannot help itself, holding
Onto the air and whispering remedies,

With Death perched at the dining table
And the walls contending that you are
Utterly alone, but the fire, suspended
In its iron box, pretends otherwise,
Hissing signs and signifiers, the secret

War of Art, contradicting the dead steel
Case and the grave's rectangle, the sons
Bearing the weight of their mystic cargo.
On its rim the black heirs lurk and say
How stately the dead look, with perfect

Composure and chin placed just so,
Invisible symphonies sorted out and
Dignified as a camel, ready to face
Whatever comes next, so the motionless
Artist, eager to know, lies and waits.

Some men sing as they leave
This earth, ringing their hosannahs,
Others, blown inward by listening,
Slip into the sky's quiet knot,
Claiming never to have heard a thing.

Keith Flynn is the author of three collections of poetry: The Talking Drum (1991), The Book of Monsters (1994), and The Lost Sea (Iris Press, 2000). From1987 to 1998, he was lyricist and lead singer for the nationally acclaimed rock band The Crystal Zoo, which produced three albums: "Swimming Through Lake Eerie" (1992), "Pouch" (1996), and the spoken-word and music compilation, "Nervous Splendor" (Animal Records, 2003). His poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Colorado Review, The Cuirt Journal (Ireland), Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry, Poetry Wales, Rattle, The Southern Poetry Review, Shenandoah, and Crazyhorse. He has been awarded the Sandburg Prize for poetry, the ASCAP Emerging Songwriter Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award and has received numerous Pushcart nominations. Flynn is the founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review. He has two books forthcoming: a collection of poems entitled The Golden Ratio (Iris Press, 2006) and a collection of essays, The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing (Writer's Digest Books, 2007).

August 15-21, 2005: Pat Riviere-Seel

I first met Pat Riviere-Seel when she entered the low residency MFA program at Queens University, in Charlotte. It was the program's first year, first semester. How lucky we were to have her. As I got to know Pat's poems, I knew this was a voice to be reckoned with. Her poems were both sensuous and sensual, poems that both talk and sing. And always there is that moment in each poem when whatever happens next could be both life-giver and destroyer.

One of the things I admire most about her poems is her deftness with language that is both fearless and elegant. Hers is a world where contradiction thrives. It is a world of loss and yet a world that finds great joy and satisfaction in the moment. Riviere-Seel moves easily between subjects as distant and mystical as the constellation Ursa Major and as mundane as the chore of hanging a ceiling fan. Her poems often take us into risky places—scenes of illicit love, places where nature reveals itself in all its beauty and its potential terror: where trees close their fingers into fists; where humans coil ready to sink…fangs into kindness.

Her cleverness with language is revealed time and time again. What an honor to have had Pat Riviere-Seel as a student at Queens. What a double honor when, soon after her graduation, she returned to read from her impressive first book, No Turning Back Now. –Cathy Smith Bowers

Cathy Smith Bowers is the author of three books of poems: The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas (Texas Tech University Press, 1992); Traveling In Time of Danger (Iris Press, 1999); and A Book of Minutes (Iris Press, 2004). She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte and lives in Tryon.


Ursa Major

Sometimes at dusk you walk
across the forest's edge, driven
by your need for food. I love
the graceful way you sway
your massive size along the ridge.

How would it feel to run
my hands through your coarse fur?
Stroke your face, so like mine,
yet lacking guile? The sky was still
streaked pink the day you lumbered down
straight toward the house. I stood
electrified by your bold move. Great
paws tumbled garden stones
in search of grubs. You sniffed, rejected
shrubs, preferring tender lilac leaves.

Closer, ever closer, with deliberate gait
you moved until you drew beside me,
your face no further from my own
than a shy lover at the door.

A pane of glass, wooden blinds
between us. You heaved your body
within my reach, each pungent breath
a sigh. I seemed to feel your warmth.

Like a savage newly saved
in fearless ecstasy I blazed.
You wove through nodding ferns,
and back again to where I stood
silent as evening prayer. Without
acknowledgement, you swung around,
stepped down into the yard and turned.

As if expecting something more,
you glanced back. My eyes met yours.
Satisfied, you disappeared into the dark.

Nights I search the northern sky
for your bright beauty twice transformed,
safe now with your son,
forever efflorescent light.


Morning Run Through Oakwood

Everything has changed but the Krispy Kreme –
        Thirty years on the same corner. The houses gleam
with fresh coats of high rent and gunmetal gray.

The house I once rented has shed its aquamarine.
        Now a sedentary sable, its Oak Grove accents blend among the Maize,
Supreme and Bradley greens; the Farewell blues.

         I too have cleaned up my act, traded cigarettes
for running shoes. Scared straight when Len Bias died,
         I've stayed drug-free.

Harvey gave up his garden,
        moved in with his lover. No one noticed
until the Holiday Home Tour.

About time, was all the neighborhood matriarch said.
        She'll outlive us all, except maybe the Civil War era oaks –
no one left to verify their longevity.

Seymour couldn't save himself – cashed in his life insurance –
        bought another six months, someone else's miracle cure.

George didn't marry Carole. I did marry Steve and survived
        four years in New Jersey, another country.
Now it's a new century

and the smell of melted sugar pulls me through the streets
        in pink-gray dawn. Housecats on front porches
stretch and yawn. A full moon clings to the western sky

and Crepe Myrtles spread their roots beneath buckling sidewalks,
        their billowing canopies hovering
above cracked concrete. I find my second wind, sprint
        toward the white, red and green neon.

Careful not to break my mother's back, I fall
        in love all over again.


Rush Hour

You'll always be the man I think I see
standing by the subway tracks
just long enough for me to wonder

could I dash down the stairs, shout
your name, catch you there, before
the doors slide shut. I watched you

wait for me in restaurant bars. I loved
the way you sat, straight and square -
composed like a calm and patient man.

I made bets with myself on just how long
before you spotted me. Near the end
you seemed to sense me there outside

the opened door. We left drinks,
dinners barely touched. Like orchids
we lived on air. Our breath silvered

windows, disappeared like ghosts.
All night we tended our exotic garden,
our own bruised lives suspended

until morning when we left lush rows
of rented sheets, picked our separate ways
blind and betrayed by sundrunk dawn.


In the Kitchen

From where I sit I see the paring knife,
your hand peeling a Winesap.
I watch a seamless spiral fall,
the measured way you carve red peel,
how it curls, drops away. You hum
some song I've heard but cannot name,
your contentment self-contained.
I wonder if you even know I watch,
amazed how casually you use
hands that pull me close.
I hate to see you with a knife,
it makes me think
how easily you could cut
the heart right out of me.


At the Dock

Before sunset, just before
the orange ball falls
from the trees' leafy arms,

just as the last day-trippers, bronzed,
blistered and sun-soaked, motor
into the dock and tie up, a man drives

a blue sedan down to the boat ramp,
stops dead center at the top
as if waiting for a friend to come in.

Hoisting his substantial bulk
up from the driver's seat, he stands
gazing into the water as if reading

oil slicks. Cranky kids hop from boat
to dock and back again. No one's
making small talk and even the sun

seems ready to go home. We're all trying
to ignore the blue-jeaned linebacker
in his shiny, snakeskin cowboy boots.

He pulls out a pack of smokes, matches,
lights a Marlboro, draws in deep,
and blows the smoke out easy.

Flicking the half-smoked cigarette,
he turns, ambles around the car,
and pushes hard on the trunk

like he's blocking a tackle.
The car creeps down the ramp,
picks up speed and noses into the water.

The man slaps his hands together twice.
Water covers the roof, bubbles hiccup
from the surface and no one speaks,

No one stirs. He wheels around,
heads back from whence he came,
two-inch heels clicking over the crest of asphalt.

Maybe he saunters home and sits alone, smoking
in the dark, ignoring calls from a former lover -
Or maybe he's smugly thinking how he fixed

that clunker that never would run right.
Maybe he answers the phone, says
sure, baby, you can have the car.


Pat Riviere-Seel's first collection of poems, No Turning Back Now (from which the first four poems presented here are drawn) was published last year and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Main Street Rag, which published "At the Dock" in 2003. She is the president of the North Carolina Poetry Society and serves on the board of the Poetry Council of North Carolina. A former journalist, she teaches poetry writing through UNC-Asheville's Great Smokies Writing Program and the College for Seniors at UNC-A. She is a native of Shelby and holds and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and a BA from North Carolina State University. She lives in Asheville with her husband, two cats, and dog.

A Note from Pat Riviere-Seel about the North Carolina Poetry Society:
The North Carolina Poetry Society is a nonprofit organization funded through membership dues ($25 per year/ $10 student rate) and contributions. Members receive a newsletter three times a year; a copy of Pinesong, a book of award-winning poems; and free entry in NCPS contests. We welcome new members.

NCPS is like a big extended family of poets and friends of poetry. Our mission is to promote the reading, writing, and enjoyment of poetry, and we're constantly looking for new ways to better serve the poetry community—through educational programs, workshops, mentoring of student poets, contests, publications, opportunities for readings, and partnerships with other writers' organizations. Like many of our members, I came to the Poetry Society through a poet friend. When I walked into my first meeting at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, it felt like coming home. It's the people who love poetry and generously share that love who make the Poetry Society a vital organization. We have the distinction of being an all-volunteer organization, and have been since six poets began NCPS, in 1932. We've grown to more than 250 members who hold three meetings and the Sam Ragan Poetry Festival at Weymouth Center each year. We also sponsor annual meetings in the east, west, and central areas of the state. Our programs feature accomplished poets, such as our own state poet laureate, who was the featured poet two years ago at the Poetry Society's first "Mountain Gathering." Programs may also include workshops, craft talks, panel discussions, and readings. We also offer plenty of time for open mike. All meetings are free and open to the public, so join us! For more information, visit our website: www.sleepycreek.org/poetry

Poet of the Week
August 22-28, 2005: Peter Makuck

photo by Sherryl Janosko

Crossing the Causeway Bridge into Atlantic Beach and looking down, you might spot Peter Makuck in his Boston Whaler, fishing the sand bars and tidal flats or simply taking friends out for a swim.  Makuck and his wife Phyllis live just a little further down on Bogue Banks, where they have made their home for the past nine years.  Poet, essayist, and fiction writer, Makuck has edited the renowned Tar River Poetry for nearly all the 30 years that he has taught at East Carolina University, in Greenville.  He is the author of five books of poetry and two collections of short stories.  His new book of poems, Off Season in the Promised Land, will be published by BOA Editions in October, 2005.

In Makuck's poetry, physical know-how and literary thought are not separate but happily joined, as in "Tight," his poem about repairing a chair and remembering a carpentry trick of his father's.  Makuck is a learned man, with degrees in French and American literature. His talk is full of humor and graceful erudition.  In his poetry—and perhaps a key to what makes it so true and convincing—lies an important connection to the natural and work-a-day worlds.  Whether he is watching the ocean and listening to "its drunken repetitions" or sitting in a chair stroking a favorite cat purring "her one mantra," Makuck offers us a powerful lyric sense of the things of the world and how they might speak to us. —John Balaban

John Balaban is the author of eleven books of poetry and prose, including four volumes that together have won The Academy of American Poets' Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award.  His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Mr. Balaban is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. In Spring, 2006, Copper Canyon Press will publish his new book of poems, entitled Path, Crooked Path.


Off Season

All day the ocean's been burning
a cold blue that matches my mother's willowware,
the few cracked cups that I've kept.
            And because there's a mood on the water

I've come along a path through the dunes
to listen to the ocean's drunken repetitions—
that story about the Wendy Lee,
how she went down in rough weather last week,
four mothers turned into widows.

Just off the bar, there's a shrimper hauling nets,
red and green running lights, a Christmas tree
in the oncoming dark.

A string of black scoters angles to the south, skims
            a surface still lit with a last brandy tinge.

This white sickle beach is empty
but for a scatter of sandpipers in winter white,
unbothered by immensity, all dash and wistful peep.

The sea mood deepens.
I've felt it before, wallowed in windy emptiness,
feeding a feeling that won't go away
and won't become something else—a voice
you once loved, her hand on your cheek,
the way your father squinched his eyes when he laughed.

But reunion doesn't happen like this.
No lambent figures looming through cheap-effect mist
with a password that opens
the radiant purpose of all things.

What do I want? I know about the lost,
what search and rescue means—
every small thing is a clue. A single light comes on
in the long curve of off-season houses.

A pelican hangs overhead like a cross.
Something invisible wants to be seen.
Gulls squall and flicker in the half dark.

The boat is disappearing
but I still see a mate in dim light working the cull.
Only the work of seeing can save.
I've known this for years.


Pretty: At the Oceania

We're jigging for blues,
sunset doing its fiery fade, showy
as this tourist couple that ambles out,
all spiffed in summer whites,
glasses of zinfandel, hot for something to see.

And as if to please,
a guy gets a screamer strike on a live bait rig.
Now a twenty pound cobia slaps the planks,
and the woman in white wrinkles her nose
with a line you might have predicted:

"He's not going to keep that poor thing, is he?"

Then it gets worse.
There's a trawler two hundred yards off the beach,
pulling nets through what's left of the sunpath,
a blizzard of gulls at the stern.

"So pretty," she says at my shoulder, "isn't it?"

No, it's not pretty, I want to say.
When you see a squall of gulls
behind a trawler on a sunset sea,
don't think beauty,
think bycatch: small blues and menhayden,
spots and croaker, unsellable mullet
littering the surface for acres,
feeding the gulls.
Think trawl doors that plow the bottom,
kill coral, fill the crannies
and hiding holes for next year's fry.
Think analogy:
harvesting corn with a bulldozer.

Pretty still echoes in the air,
and she is too.
Lips glistening with wine, she asks
if all this ain't as pretty as a postcard?

Looking down at the cobia making mouths,
dying, slowly dying,
I tell her it is.


Hurricane Warning: Surfers

Around the bend slides an ocean eerie with storm light
and them at serious play: red and yellow wet suits, blue

and lime, their unconcern a reminder of something
long forgotten but now too strong to let go. Wind tugs

our pants and sleeves and has our hair fly back like spume
from the crests of fifteen footers rolling in. We lean

against the wind and hear the fringe of pampas grass
threshing above the beach where these boys worry

not a jot for tomorrow and make light of leaden swells—
a dream of Waimea Bay and the ache of endless summer

come at last to the Carolinas. Oblivious of snapping red flags,
riptides and undertows, they wait and wait for one moment

to lift them, a force evolving shape within us, making us
wait too, smile when the curl flexes and tilts them ahead

toward a lethal bottom of sand. How they tame the edge,
gravity giving way to a grace of their own making!

Some miss the moment and wait still, and when we leave
the island, exiled inland, I'm not even thinking of our house

turned to matchwood. Days later, through sweaty hours
of shingle and tack, chainsaw and tree limb, I still see

that boy farthest out, the one waiting past friends, now up
in one motion, his wetsuit blazing orange, ready to defy all ruin.

Peter Makuck's stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in The Hudson Review, Poetry and The Sewanee Review. Author of five books of poetry, he has edited Tar River Poetry at East Carolina University for twenty-seven years. Off Season in the Promised Land, a new volume of poems, will be published by BOA Editions, Ltd. this fall. 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.

August 29 – September 5, 2005: Kathy Ackerman

photo by Gary Ackerman

I met Kathy Cantley Ackerman only four months ago. She was waiting for me in her office at Isothermal Community College, in Spindale, ready to drive me to dinner and then to the reading I was to give that night. The face that looked up when I knocked was relieved (I was late!) and keenly alert, elfin even. Yes, Kathy is short, as she says in "Substance": "There is too much of me for five feet (in heels)/to bear with grace." Well, let Kathy speak of her physical appearance. I will speak of her poetry. There is never too much to be borne in her poems, because her craft enables them to move with grace, humor, and intelligence. I had not known Kathy was a poet. She tucked that information into one of her emails before I arrived, almost as an afterthought, or so it seemed. She gave me her two chapbooks before I left the next morning. I thanked her, took them home, began to read The Time It Takes, got as far as "Ritual" and stopped, asked myself, Where has this poet been hiding? Why has it taken me so long to find her? By the time I'd finished her book Crossbones and Princess Lace, I had stopped asking any questions at all. These poems had not been hiding. They'd simply been waiting. Patiently. With substance. —Kathryn Stripling Byer


Hillbillies

We were refugees already
when Kennedy fired his first shot
in the poverty war,
caravans of cardboard bursting

doilies, quilts, and grandfather clocks
headed north to trade schools
assembly lines
tool & die.

Our men who left the mountains, the mines
cashed in their coal dust lungs
and carbide lamps
for safety goggles,

machines that drilled and punched
and pressed
waist high
not coal but steel
for parts on a line

while the ancient soil recycles
and none of my blood
still owns a piece of mountain.

The longing skips. A generation
learns itself in story nights of
funeral feasts.

On understanding family porches
history sheds its laurel shroud.
They lean and smoke.
Ashes fall into the darkness,

into the pungent dust of pride
and time that mutes the whistle of death
from nearby vacant coal shafts.


Substance

One could say I embody concentration, short, compressed.
There is too much of me for five feet (in heels)
to bear with grace. The lines of me do not elongate
on ballerina toes, do not glide on runways.
There is no waif inside me, eager to be released.
I know. I've looked for her repeatedly.

But at forty, the breath of death is on the mirror,
more felt than seen. Even my dying cat,
thin as an angel hair ghost, makes me reflect

a squat temple of health. I have substance no worry, grief or
chemo could diminish rapidly, my grandmother's arms,
Too round for shunning sleeves, my Aunt Sue's hips I blame
on books, though she has never been a reader.
None of me is flattered by swimwear.

But what if I am halfway to an end of summer
beaches, or nearer and I am pale and drier than ever.
Shall I buy a sensible suit of extravagant tropical colors
and walk amid the young deluded vain perfection
happily irradiating themselves on the sand?

I remember all the diminished ones,
diminished against their wills,
the inexplicable dot on my first mammogram
that only time could reveal
to have been there always. I think of actuaries,
obituaries, and try to imagine a body refusing to be visible.
I will mourn for her as I will mourn for many
and I will happily look ridiculous
in extravagant tropical snorkel gear,
finning backward into the surf.

Ritual
     for my grandmother, Zada Miller Cantley Bell

Zada Bell is canning again.
Grocery bills run high
because she does not know the word:
obsolescence—
cannot get her mind around the cost
hot house tomatoes,
continuous city blueberries.

Her air-conditioned kitchen
fogs in succulent ancient steam
well into night
as if grapes still know their season

as if someone still prefers the
wax crusted masons
graying on the shelf.

She knows only her part
In the cycle of morning to meals
to morning
fear of having neither
growing younger in her age,
tasting
early berry
mountain sunrise
supple skin of younger hands
a harvest in their reach.


Contraception

My body knows these moons,
these shapes, this light
are not the point;
it is only the deliberate emptiness they leave.

28 lunar disks in an oval
foil silver sky
yielding inconsistently
to my daily nudge.

I force each predetermined dose
through a space each morning
leaving jagged phases of moon behind
to hold to light.

In this unnatural universe a slim imperfect sickle
might phase to full in one day only
like a miracle, like the dreaded
oneth percentile.

It is a simple matter of measured pressure
to force a circle through a circle straight,
a simple matter of concentration,
not to crumble, not to shatter a million
tiny molecules of future phases.


The Other Choice

Books. I know books. An easier gift
for a seven year old biannually visited
on the opposite edge of the continent
than clothes or toys or other cool and transitory things.
But it is not so easy, this knowing I need
to judge stories by more than font size and pictures.
When I ask the clerk which ones are right
she asks how well my child reads
and before I've thought to hesitate
my words are unwatched toddlers, jolting—if I had a child
I'd know these things.
She looks me over: I am taboo. Middle-aged, middle-class,
as fertile as anyone and happily married to boot.
Her pity goes unswallowed, grows unfriendly
As she leads me like a lost small thing
To browse the proper overflowing shelf
Having made my choice.

Kathy Cantley Ackerman was born in West Virginia. She earned a master's degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a doctorate in American literature from the University of South Carolina. She teaches English at Isothermal Community College, in Spindale, North Carolina. The first four poems presented here are drawn from Ms. Ackerman's first chapbook, The Time It Takes (Georgetown, KY: New Women's Voices Series, Finishing Line Press). The final two poems are drawn from her book Crossbones & Princess Lace, which won the third annual Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Publication Award. Ms. Ackerman's poems have appeared in North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. Her critical biography, The Heart of Revolution: The Radical Life & Novels of Olive Dargan, will be published by University of Tennessee Press.