Featured Poet
( North Carolina )
Every day for 40 years he prayed between rows of corn, among hogs, grunting and screaming their reports of the mortal world. He worked harder than most because he had to, no son, nephew, grandchild to pitch in. He knew, of course, from the beginning, but what could that, what could anything matter in the face of love. She was simply the best woman he had ever known, kind to a fault, giving, hard-working, always smiling, always singing, as ready to listen as share her own thoughts, but no miracle ever came, no immaculate conception, no marvel of modern science gave them the children they wanted. Near the end, the land was divided into 200 10-acre parcels for nearby kids whose families had little. The town wondered what happened to the money, but nothing was ever sold outright. Every dime he got he gave back in candy, Bazooka Joes, butterscotch, Good & Plenty.In Splintered View of God
Darkness. Cold. Head full of black and moaning. Each shirt a dead child above him an empty sleeve, an unfulfillment of buttons. How long he wonders, this bestiary of boots and walls, this world behind his right eye, this mouth closing on darkness. Sudden light at hinges, at cracks in the door jamb. Mystical whistle of movement. Celestial hum of half-heard voice. Hands grasp thin ribbons of light. Face presses to splintered grain of door. Mouth tongues bits of sound. Breath held. Heart slowed to match the pad of footsteps on the other side. When the footsteps fade, when the light dissolves to dark again, he fills the silence with silent wings of silent things, faces where the light should be, with his own mind’s screaming for meaning. He searches the folds of his clothes, hands, mouth for words, names, for the “Yes” of an unseen speaker.March with Your Flowers Burning
Just as I had gotten things under control again, you showed up, with your head in the clouds, your eyelids full of rain, your cuffs of late snow, your feet tracking mud, you who refuse to be ruled, you with your willow’s strand of pearls, you with your fingers sucking scilla, daffodil, crocus, your nostrils stuffed with snot, your cheeks puffed, your lips dripping lullabies, your rainbow-wicked smile, you with your forsythia switch, your many-voweled throat, your mind like black ice, your hands always open , the slap and plea, the cup and howl, the easy lure, the careless jangle of trees. How could I hope to respond, my arms grown thin, my eyes winter-blind, my hands unaccustomed to such change? You were the one I dreamed of, with your mouth full of promises, your cheeks honey-smeared, your hands around my balls.____________________
Scott Owens is the 2008 Visiting Writer at Catawba Valley Community College. His second collection of poetry, The Fractured World, is due out from Main Street Rag in August, 2008. He is also author of The Persistence of Faith from Sandstone Press and recipient of poetry awards from the Academy of American Poets, the North Carolina Writers Network, and the Blumenthal Reading Series. Owens’ poems have appeared in Georgia Review, North American Review, Poetry East, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cimarron Review, Greensboro Review, Chattahoochee Review, Cream City Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Cottonwood, among others. Born in Greenwood, South Carolina, he now lives in Hickory, North Carolina, where he teaches and coordinates the Poetry Alive reading series in Hickory.