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Starkey Flythe, Jr. (October 2006)
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They Say Dancing, ‘96’ Press
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Flythe graduated from the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, and served with the U. S. Army in Africa and the Middle East. He was re-founding and managing editor of the Curtis Company publications, Saturday Evening Post, and Holiday magazine, and has had stories anthologized in the Best American, New Stories from the South, and O. Henry annuals. A collection, Lent: the Slow Fast, won the University of Iowa Prize in 1990. he has two books of poetry, Paying the Anesthesiologist, and They Say Dancing, both from Furman University’s ‘96’ Press. He is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Pen/Syndicated Fiction Prize winner, and accompanied President Nixon to Egypt in 1975. |
was a lamp, brass, maybe brass-plated,
a Chinese boy who'd stopped fishing,
or had he been carrying something?
the bamboo pole with the buckets
either end, laid down there, by his feet.
And he sat on the metal grass,
made himself comfortable, was reading,
the intensest look on his brass face,
a pigtail, coolie jacket, pajama pants.
I stared at it for hours, the kind of thing
a child wants to be or to be in or to break,
be punished for as if being a child had rest stops
and pit falls that should be got over fast
and with a definite crash instead of being drawn out,
infinitely. |
The coolie leaned against the glass cylinder
where the light bulb socket was, fluted glass
so the light flowed out in rainbows,
and you could imagine the words,
how if you mispronounced a Chinese syllable
it meant midwife (whatever that was)
instead of peony (which didn't grow here).
On the top was a pagoda lid.
The glass broke first. The pagoda rested
on the naked light bulb until it got hot.
My father bought a lower watt bulb.
Then, against the wall on the top of the book shelf
the boy, once a lamp, became an end, leaned
and held National Geos and paperbacks.
I wonder where it went, not valuable
enough to steal, beautiful enough to survive
people moving, tastes changing, broken marriages,
lares, penates, fire, the frayed electric cord.
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Brigitte Byrd (November 2006)
Fence Above the Sea, Ahsahta Press New Series
Byrd was born in Paris, and worked there as a dancer before moving to the U.S. in 1988. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Clayton State University, and a graduate from Florida State University, where she received a Ph.D. in 2003. “In 1990, as I drove through the South where I was going to live, I was decontextualized. Here I was, a Parisian driving an old Chrysler Imperial LeBaron, stopping to take Polaroid’s of “Baits and Tires” shops, Kudzu, cotton flowers and dead trees rooted in bayous. The Southern accent took me by surprise and forced me to question this America and my knowledge of the English language to become an active participant in its production. And in the production of my life, why had I expected a permanent meaning?”
Dr. Byrd's home page:http://a-s.clayton.edu/bbyrd/Homepage.htm |
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James Kimbrell (December 2006)
My Psychic: Poems, Sarabande Books
Kimbrell was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1967. He is a graduate of Millsaps College, the University of Southern Mississippi, the University of Virginia, and the University of Missouri, Columbia. He is the author of two volumes of poems, The Gatehouse Heaven (Sarabande, 1998), and My Psychic: Poems. He is the winner of a 2003 Florida Arts Council Individual Artist's Grant; the 2000 Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers Conference; the 1996 and 1997 Academy of American Poets Prize awarded at the University of Missouri; and the 1997 Bess Hoykin Prize and 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, both from Poetry Magazine, and a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing program at Florida State University. |
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And what did I know of madness or fathers? First,
The old gatehouse guard’s country music, the katydids
And crickets and fire ants catacombed in their mirexed
Mounds. Then a narrow brick road and the groomed
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Asylum lawn strewn with fronds of withering mimosas.
Then the fish-boned shadows of limbs, the walls
And barred windows awash in a light the color of rust,
Or river water, of a shade at dusk thicker than I’d seen |
In the stain-glassed fields of junked automobiles
Jackson anchored to. After that, I thought it all saintly,
Heroic, the madhouse a heaven the farthest flung
Angels flocked in. And my father amongst them: gowns |
And clouds and a ladder I climbed, rung by rung, hand-
Lengths behind them, far from the shock beds and Librium
High above the wing-beats and wailing that filled
The halls he walked, his slippered feet testing the ground. |
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Wilmer Mills (March 2007)
Mills is a woodworker in Sewanee Tennessee. His Chapbook, Right as Rain, was published in 1999 by Aralia Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He spent his childhood in Brazil, where his parents were agricultural missionaries for the Presbyterian Church. |
| Figs in Autum
Their lids preserve the truth,
Dark urn-like jars on pantry shelves,
July, August, keeping themselves
Intact and succulent for tooth
And tongue. They sleep in syrup’s sweet
Suspense, but when leaves blow to the door
And the woodstove fills our house with heat,
Last summer’s figs will fall once more.
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Jeff Hardin (February 2007)
Hardin manages to combine the conscience and sensibility of the 17th century English poet-divines with the Pagan wonder of Walter Pater. Perhaps Blake is his bridge. Out of the rural south-replete with flower robbed graves and bottomlands, hog pens and the voice of Keith Whitley-Hardin quietly reinvigorates poetry’s claim for intimacy; with the natural world, with language and even with the mind hearing itself. |
See, this magnolia bloom,
its petals thick and rubbery,
tenacious, not easily cast aside,
so much fragrance
I get a little giddy
just breathing in its presence-
this is the manner of world
we wake to every day:
small revelations, curling and intricate;
and what should we become then,
how speak to one another,
how move beyond these faces
we prepare, if such a world exists? |
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Lola Haskins (April 2007)
Desire Lines, BOA
Haskins’ poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, The London Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She has published eight collections, most recently Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA, 2004). Two prose books are forthcoming this year, Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to the Poetic Life, and Solutions Beginning with A, a book of fables about women, with images by Maggie Taylor. Her commentaries are regularly broadcast on Recess, on NPR.
For more information, please see www.lolahaskins.com. |
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Dearborn North Apartments
Chicago, Illinois
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Rows of rectangles rise, set into brick.
And in every rectangle, there is a lamp.
Why should there be a lamp in every window?
Because in all this wide city, there is not
enough light. Because the young in the world
are crazy for light and the old are afraid
it will leave them. Because whoever you are,
if you come home late but it looks like noon,
you won't tense at the click as you walk in
which is probably after all only the heat
coming on, or the floorboards settling.
So when you fling your coat to its peg in
the hall, and kick off your heels, and unzip
your black velvet at that odd vee'd angle as if
someone were twisting your arm from behind,
then reach inside the closet for a hanger,
just to the dark left where the dresses live,
what happens next is a complete surprise. |
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