Sunday, October 19, 2008

The Case of the Missing Letter

Now that I've begun to find peace with the barrage of rejection slips nestled inside smudged, crumpled, sometimes-torn return envelopes, a new terror has inhabited my mailbox.

Thursday afternoon, I opened the mailbox and saw with mixed emotion the pink corner of a post office notice card sticking out from under the sundry catalogs and bill envelopes.  I hadn't ordered anything I could remember.  And then, the horror, the horror.  Across the card was not the typical sender address for a package, but rather an ugly stamped "INSUFFICIENT POSTAGE." No sender.  No clues.

I called the post office in a frenzy.  Should I come in to pay and collect my letter, which surely was from an editor?  Who else would hold a return envelope long enough to outlive the current postage rate?  I was told I could simply attach my payment (a bank-breaking 17 cents) to the card and leave it in the mailbox for the mailman who would then deliver my letter.

This I did.

And waited. And waited.  The 17 cents disappeared.  The letter has yet to grace my mailbox. I am SURE  the letter is from a prestigious press assuring me of the immediate publication of my book and offering a large advance.  

Maybe mystery letters are nicer than plain ol' rejection slips after all.
Posted by at 7:37 AM
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Sample Poems

 

Crevices

When the Texas summer
had stretched our yards
until they brittled and cracked,
the boy next door
would place his ear
over the narrow crevice
that ran beneath the fence
from his dirt to mine
and listen for my voice
teasing through the broken clay.
We sank into conversations,
each of us mistaking
the crumbling of the soil
and the shifting
of our own bodies
for the words we needed to hear.

-Alice Pettway
The Mid-America Poetry Review Summmer 2008

A Young Seal

Pale child's body
rift between dark eyes
and white skin,

blurring beneath
the surface
marred by rain,

arching
and unarching
as it slides under

the algae and appears
unblinking
too far away

for me to guess
the distance
between us.

Then its final,
seamless exit,
slick and clean,

and I who have feared
the turning, the close,
sit anchored,

scanning the shore
and the water
and the shore

and the water,
unable to stand,
unable to walk away.


Alice Pettway
Crab Creek Review, 2005

Elegy

I wanted to find you, smashed
and perfect like a penny
on the railroad tracks
after the wheels have stretched
the engravings into elegance,
not your old, round self:
raised face and scratches
to worry at in my pocket.

Alice Pettway
Di.verse.city 2005

She Practices Her Death

She fills the bathtub with cranberries
They pile up on her belly
then pour over her edges
and slip beneath her,
crushed against the porcelain.
Their rough-tongued juice colors her back
and trickles into her navel.
It rises until she can dip her chin
down into it
and let it into the corners of her mouth.
Her stained hands flit over her face,
leaving little kiss-prints on her skin.

Alice Pettway
The Bitter Oleander Fall 2004

Snake Charmer

Your eyes were full of sand dunes.
I burrowed through them
searching for your sarcophagus
and found it full of peach pits
and old photographs.
My toothbrush has stared
at your bottle of cologne
for an insufferable amount of time;
I keep intending to throw it
off the balcony. I was studying
to be a snake charmer.
You were my first subject
but refused to come out of the basket;
I can only play three notes on my pungi.
At night, I poke my legs up under the sheet
so you can fan me with palm leaves
in my silk-tent mirage. I lie crossways:
buckle together the two sides of my bed.
They have a disturbing tendency
to separate into his and hers.

Alice Pettway
Lullwater Review. Winter 2002. Vol. XIII, No. 1.