September 2024 Poetry Feature

New Poems by Our Contributors MORRI CREECH, ELISA GABBERT, ANNA GIRGENTI, and GRANT KITTRELL.

 

Table of Contents:

  • Morri Creech, “The Others”
  • Elisa Gabbert, “A Hermitage”
  • Anna Girgenti, “The Goldfinch”
  • Grant Kittrell, “Losing It”

 

The Others
By Morri Creech

The children that I have never had follow me, late, through the vacant corridors.
They whisper there is still time, time for the quarter moon to nock its black arrow

and let it loose toward the receding target, to bury it into the future marrow-deep.
They comb my hair by starlight, they write my name down in a thousand ledgers.

And they brush away the songs from my lips that I sing to the children they envy,
those children who occupy the pockets of air that the dead have left behind them

and who take their own places without question at the kitchen table, the children
who turn over in their sleep without dreaming yet of the dark they will return to,

who think neither of yesterday nor of tomorrow, who have begun to replace me,
those who managed to writhe from the slick ashes, waiting, waiting to be named.

 

A Hermitage
By Elisa Gabbert

If I lived in a cave for 500 days
I’d bring the diary of Admiral Byrd
who went to inland Antarctica alone
for a fantasy of listening to music.

It’s hard to hold the eyes still,
hard to remember the names on graves
and that these pencil underlines
in a 1940s library book aren’t mine—

It’s not my philosophy. I’m not divine
like the storied man who looked at
a red and black painting so long
he saw cyan light shining out of it.

I wonder if there is a distance between
what you want and what you wish,
and if it’s colder at night there in winter,
or what could night mean?

 

The Goldfinch
By Anna Girgenti

It flitted, before you arrived, between the dying honeysuckle
and the bull thistle drying in the late summer heat, looping

around a telephone wire and then pausing on the sidewalk
beside me, tilting its head,

and in that moment I was stunned 
by the color of it, the brightest burning yellow 

imaginable, a color I had never known or forgotten 
existed, a neon flame I wanted to hold in my hand, 

but it took off down the alley, bobbing through the heavy 
afternoon sun and then you 

were stepping out of a car, 
walking toward me in that way you do, with a lilt and a rush

and we stood for a while where it had been, kissing
in the memory of it and whispering the way we do, 

in reverence for the creatures of the world that call to us,
that surround us and reach into us and terrify us,

that claim their space like a blade in a mouth, 
that show up and remind us with their warmth 

that we are at once impossible 
and flowering, in flight and still here.

 

Losing It
By Grant Kittrell

even the dogs know it’s time

          to be still     walk slow and light

into the morning      seeped

  in restraint       finches graze

without conflict at the feeders

  we hang for our pleasure      no less hungry

for all they hunger      but spare a seed

  of regard for the storm

that will not arrive      today      only

  more clouds      only      a wind

that is not quite viscous but is brave

  enough to stir the chimes      eventually

a groundhog will thrust her head

  past the threshold of our deck

under which she has reared an entire family

  without word      soon enough a hunger will clover

with a vengeance and the dogs will just lose it–

   what on earth      did they have

to lose      my silence      coiling      like copperhead    

   like      thunder

 

Morri Creech is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Sleep of Reason, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Blue Rooms, and, most recently, The Sentence. A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as grants from the North Carolina and Louisiana Arts councils, he is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self. Her other books include Normal DistanceThe Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, and The Word Pretty. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.

Anna Girgenti is a Midwestern artist and writer. She was a recipient of the 2018 Iowa Chapbook Prize from the University of Iowa. Her poetry has appeared in various print and online publications, including THRUSH, Lunch Ticket, Zone 3 Press, Harpur Palate, and Mid-American Review. 

Grant Kittrell is a writer, illustrator, musician, and author of the poetry collection Let’s Sit Down, Figure This Out. His writing has appeared in a range of publications, including Terrain.org, Salt Hill, The Common, The Carolina Quarterly, Split Rock Review, The Normal School, and Gigantic Sequins, and his poetry was recently selected for inclusion in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology. Grant currently serves as the Director of the Academic Services Center and the Writing Program at Randolph College, where he also teaches English. He lives in Lynchburg, VA with his partner, Hannah, and their squirrel-crazy pups, Margot and Hap. More info at grantkittrell.com.

September 2024 Poetry Feature

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