Cartier Street Review Acceptance

Joy Leftow has informed me that "Pills" has been accepted for publication in The Cartier Street Review.

You can see a fellow Albion College poet, Stephanie Edwards, in the current (April) edition of The Cartier Street Review, http://thecartierstreetreview.blogspot.com/.

ETA: Joy Leftow contacted me later and after re-reading my submission decided to accept "Contained" for The Cartier Street Review.

The Smoking Book, online publication

Pieces I and Pieces II were accepted for online publication at The Smoking Book, you can check them out here:

http://thesmokingbook.blogspot.com/2009/04/pieces.html

I will hear back from Joy and Roxanne about whether I make the print edition in October.

At least I got something published, finally.

New Project: Tell Me of Kentucky

Now that my thesis is officially bound, and I've read at Elkin Isaac (a student symposium at Albion College where students share their research and creative works) I have yearned to write but felt lost without a larger project to work within.

I think I have figured out the next project. For Elkin Isaac I had my grandmother and Dr. Judy Lockyer meet for lunch (my mother and I were there, but we were kind of a sidebar). My grandmother loves talking about Kentucky, where she was born and grew up. She especially loves talking about it to people who know what she's talking about and as Judy is from Kentucky, she understood much of what my grandmother spoke about.

For my next project I'm going to interview my grandmother and other relatives about Kentucky. I'm also going to read about every author or book that I can that's about Kentucky or coal country. Then I'll write poems about what I hear. I think that this will be satisfying.

I will be posting first and early, working drafts in this blog. I'm sure updates will follow!

(As requested...V)

Asunder



I have a dream: I lose all my teeth, each one
a white tree stump freed from my gum.

I tell her my dream. It hurt, I say. She smiles,
places her palm in the small of my back and pushes.

I am delicate origami, a crane of green rice paper
and she gives me to the rain.

Impossible, she says. Water spreads across me,
soaks, dissolves my fibers. We cannot feel

pain in our dreams. I am paste on the sidewalk,
melting into the grit of concrete, ink streaming into the storm drain.

(As requested...IV)

The Dead



At my aunt's funeral, I was small and asked,
Mama, why is everyone crying?
This was more alarming than the black box,
than an unmoving body—the mass
of people distraught.

My mother re-speaks her sister’s words,
Always be good to Charlie.
And resolute, my mother invited ex-brother-in-law
to Christmas Eve dinners, to birthdays. He never
ate any turkey or drank any wine
out of a paper cup except once. He gave me,
the graduate, a card and having endured us,
he left without a word.

I cannot imagine him dribbling the basketball
as reported. His sweat dyed his shirt yellow. Did he
stop suddenly, drop the ball and allow his eyes
to grow as wide as the pain shivering in his veins?

When the doctor could not restore a pulse, he called
the mother and told her that her son's heart
had stopped squeezing.
In the nursing home,
she did not cry into the pillow,
over-starched and not her own.

You don't mess with the dead, my mother says.
We quietly sign the forms that arrived with the will
and do not look at each other.