Ingrid Browning Moody

 

Ingrid Browning Moody’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, New South, RHINO, The Texas Review and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Arriving After Dark, won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and will be published by Texas Review Press in fall 2011.  She teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

 

 

Kerry James Evans

 

Kerry James Evans is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Florida State University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Georgetown Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, New England Review, The Pinch, Poet Lore, AGNI, Roger, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.  His first book Soldier’s Apology has been a runner up for the Poulin Prize, a finalist for National Poetry Series and many other competitions.

 

This reading was recorded by Frank Giampietro and FSU English Department at the Warehouse, an off-campus location at Florida State University.  Skip to 34:00 minutes to listen to the introduction and reading.

 

http://english3.fsu.edu/media/season5/wh_04-20-10.mp3

Sarah McCartt-Jackson

 

McCartt-Jackson hails from the Bluegrass State and is a graduate student in the MFA program in poetry at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale where she also teaches creative writing.  In 2009, she was the runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Prize at SIUC.  She currently serves as the poetry editor for Sunsets & Silencers online literary magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interlude – (for Domestication)

 

These moments happen.  Suddenly –

a stitch drops off

  the needle, bares cold the metal.

Those clacking sounds. Cease.

 

And when you look through

   yourself in the mirror, the silver

sheet is only an ugly face.  A thin lip. 

       A pleat creased,

 

   starched into another pant leg.

 

There is no lace

    in the hinge of your knee.

  But there is yes

flat as linoleum, yes graver

          than a diamond,

 

Yes in a cattail grating

on the sleeve of a reed.

 

 

~originally appeared in Monolith

 

 

 

Double Wedding Ring

 

The water surges and raises the silt,

which lines the valley bellies with yellow slurry. 

 

As mud eddies inside the hearth

and coagulates the fireplace ashes,

 

Ora remembers her own wedding

like sweeping a broom through bloodroot,

 

their marriage the splink

of rust-warm rain on a tin roof,

 

his touch like goldenrod pollen

in the small space between her legs.

 

Her yes was the bell of jonquil cones,

his voice a hubcap rattling with gravel.

 

 

 

Angela Brazeal

 

Angela Brazeal grew up in St. Louis, Missouri.  She received her MA in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2004.  Her graduate thesis, titled Space Under the Tongue, was a collection of short stories and poetry.  Her work has been published in local San Antonio university journals, Quirk and The Luminous Page, and her poetry has been featured in the San Antonio Express News.  Currently, she is an English Instructor at Northeast Lakeview College where she teaches English courses from Freshman Composition to American Literature. 

 

 

The Circle of Life

 

My mom is the recipient of grocery lists and

dirty looks from my grandma, who has,

since 1986, lived in my mom and dad’s house.

She is eighty-eight years old and can no longer

drive herself to Thousand Oaks Baptist church, or

to Sensational Hair (for a weekly wash and set), or

the Dollar Store (where she buys greeting cards),

or to the grocery (to replenish her supply of cashews).

When she hitches a ride with my mom, she

voices her discontent for various offenses:

chili that was too spicy, clothes left in the washing

machine on her washing day, or a phone call missed

when the line was tied up.  My mom first sits

in silence, eventually yelling back until

they scrapple like a mom and teenage daughter.

When grandma scolds mom, across the

kitchen table, for buying the wrong brand of Gas-X,

my dad and I hardly stifle our laughter, until

finally the snarls are directed at us.

 

 

The Basics

 

Before I could begin school at Woerther

Elementary, my mom insisted I learn several

basic skills. I must remember to always

put paper on the toilet seat, never holler

“I’m finished” from the bathroom and wait

for my teacher to help, and most important:

I must be able to spell my whole name. 

Just  “A-N-G,” like my dad taught me,

would not hold up in big kid school. 

After the trials of learning to spell the whole

thing, writing my Z in the right direction,

and leaving accidental pieces of forgotten

toilet paper on the all three toilet seats

in our house, I was ready.  When I arrived

at school, my teacher called me “Angie,”

which I couldn’t spell.  I went to the

bathroom to cry, and in my hysteria, forgot

to put paper down on the seat, and I knew

better than to holler for help.

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Jenna Bazzell

 

Jenna Bazzell is a third-year poetry MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a graduate assistant who has taught English Composition 101 and 102.  She has also been an intern with Crab Orchard Review and currently the director of the Saluki Writer’s Project volunteer- teaching creative writing.

 

 

Nightgown

 

 

Think of what ghosts we slip into, or they into us. Other lives, gone

or not, like a shadow at night, like a sprawling dark, your hand pressed

 

palm-flat, to the window, to know something shields us.

Tonight, call back the ghosts you refused—listen for their steps

 

from the ceiling to your floor—a pair of untied sneakers, a pair

of stumbling bare feet. Such nights like this you find you’re spun

 

in your mother’s skin: the olive complexion of her freckled shoulders,

her neck slender bent over a coffee table, over a crushed white line.

 

Hand-cupping it. The intuitive way you know the film of pill dust,

how to test for your pulse. Other nights you wake with your father’s face,

 

creased, concerned as old photos over the past and even more, the present,

or smaller things: bread crumbs under the refrigerator, your tulips

 

dying, one summer after another, and how to tell you what skin

they wear, too, slips back years as it was before money wasn’t around,

 

your mother waiting in parking lots for drug dealers before she was committed,

before we had to move in with her parents. But tonight, your skin wears thin.

 

Lets them in. Like a smoke-thin dark. Like how death might look

seen from another side. Ash-thin. No place to keep them but here.

 

Like this: remember each time you pressed your ear

to your mother’s chest against her nightgown, or mimicked

 

your breathing with hers, you listened for her song as she sang to you,

its simple refrain reminding you: sleep is the closest thing to dying,

 

you never forgot as she must still be ripping her life from the buttons,

but carrying around our lives in that moment together. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Visiting Hours

 

 

And these walls won’t speak the words the nurse waits for,

that I have repeated and still don’t understand, that I am here

 

to see my mother, who is not dying exactly, but waiting,

no idea how to gauge time by the light of fluorescent tubing.

 

It’s low-level buzz robs each memory of sound, so that she

cannot recall music and voices, even the long sound of an

 

ashtray breaking against a wall. In her room, vents rattle

and sigh, cold air edges under the hospital bed, her eyes,

 

the color of iron; her face thin as the starched sheets,

her cheeks and collarbones sunken, the cotton gown

 

washed to the delicacy of lace, the rusty color of her voice

like dying light; her skin, her thinned legs, the rhythm

 

of her heart, now, mimicked in bleeps. Each day, she cups her hand

around my bicep as tubes dangle from the pit of her other elbow.

 

And each day, we walk this stainless hall to a patio between

two wards, both solid brick, in which she stares past the sun-

 

bleached chairs and barberry shrubs, into a world

she has been barred from. She sits in a pool of sunlight

 

tapping a cigarette loose from her pack. She tells me

there are ways out of everything. But one day, turns into two,

 

then a week and sometimes a month. This time, it has been a week.

She walks back through the unlatched door, her hair lit

 

with sunshine, a cloud of smoke rising around her.

 

 

 

 

Turkey Creek, Alabama, 2004

 

 

Lampblack, coyotes drag their long howls through the moonlight

as pine trees nudge each other in the length of wind

                         and move from shadow to shadow.

 

The kudzu and the sweet gum drape over the gravel-slung road

                            where twelve gauge slugs sunk into the river’s clay banks

an up thrust of wheatgrass pods toss in darkness, as a series of telephone

poles stretch the length of dark ditches under a scalded sky.