Featured Poet
( North Carolina )
First, you, as a woman, should: Use that slipping-into-mud thing you do so well, the layers of past embracing your chin, slicking your tanktop, fingering his fossil heart in the geode under your bed, caressed like moss clung to the back of your shirt after what he termed “field studies” or grounds for naming mountains. Secondly: Flaunt your feminine wiles while using terms like horsetail, loosestrife, palm (against an open cheek, my lover’s greeting). Claim nomenclature’s your specialty due to a mastery of Latin. Extol the preeminence of classical language, nodding intently when discussing the Pennsylvanian period (mouth “Penn’s Woods”). Decline in the neuter: disavow gender when plundering limbs or parsing signals from both smoke and steam. If no results yield, try this: Shine your flashlight, always on your belt, into mocking darkness, the cave opening for you again and again as you clasp hands, tricked down aisles, into ruins of ago, of yore, or a 40 story tree shattered in remote blasts, aftershock’s edge, primordial wave, what happened when he grinned, (teeth flash, neck bare), and find and find in your light amber grains, palm fronds, crosshatched ceilings, the favored climate of sinsick musk vapors mingling with detergent, determined for restructuring, for latching on, looping into muck, stained for an eon, (that crust more than penetrated) accidentally recovered. And, lastly, upon your success: Try to forget your shortcomings (namely the “discovery event” of the First). Remember suddenly those laboratory imprints, leaf rubbings, textbook wax comforting blisters on your left forefinger where cigarettes burn when you pay them no mind. Deliberate the antediluvian: slice of canine against veins; gusting mixture of must and soap; fossil hearts secreted in stones… Finally, embrace your newfound expertise.old medicine poem
lean in toward slip of muslin slice of twine burn belly smoke try for fever-break jewelweed and nettle hellebore and yarrow ease your pain, child under gothic canopy focus on poplar locust smear of sarvis bittersweet and rue during wax of moonshine revival keep husks near your breast ease your pain, child brace for pulpit’s release this Jack a man you’ve no need to fear through barefoot Gomorrah stick to the path of cast bones lean in long ease your painPlanting by the Signs
fourteen kill days each month, kept for menial chores gleaning the ritual of breasts and bowels, waiting for loins to bear finally zodiac’s progress: sprouts creep from clay squint of Copernican sun hinders vision, direct descendants of forecast and wane plot the cosine primed for impostors (your adze in the air) moon-wax spares even the weariest seed-weavers from mistaking gather weed fallow plenty____________________
Nicole Cartwright Denison lives on a trout farm in the mountains of western North Carolina, is the author of Recovering the Body (dancing girl press, 2007) and a Best of the Net 2008 nominee. Work is forthcoming in blossombones and WOMB, and has appeared in Ectoplasmic Necropolis, tattoo highway, Poetry Midwest, Alba, octaves magazine, The Commonline Project, elimae, reimagining place: Ecotone’s Blog, Blue Fifth Review, Siren, The Pedestal Magazine, and others.