Ice, Ice, and More Ice
In case you missed the national news, everyone here has spent the last week living log cabin style and trying to dig out from under the massive mounds of demolished trees. All joking aside, the devastation was heart-wrenching. I fought my depression over the mangled trees (and entertained the neighbors) by crawling around the yard with my macro lens. Beauty hides even in the midst of destruction.
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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
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1 comments:
Found you through a Google Alert "random acts of poetry."
I love the red berries, iced, brilliant.
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