Three Poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10)

An excerpt from “Secrets,” one of three poems by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10) appearing at Scoundrel Time:

 

Secrets

At two a.m., without enough spirits
Spilling into my liver to know enough
To call my tongue to silence, Miles learned
Of the years I spent inside a box: a spell,
A kind of incantation I was under; not whisky,
But History: I robbed a man. This, months
Before he would drop bucket after bucket
On opposing players, the entire bedraggled
Bunch five and six and he leaping as if
Every lay-up erases something. That’s how
I’d saw it, my screaming-coaching-sweating
Presence recompense for the pen; my father
Has never seen me play ball is part of this.
My son has seen me drink whisky in the morning
Is the other part. Tell me we aren’t running
Towards failure is what I want to ask my kid,
But it is two in the a.m. and despite him seeming
More lucid than me, I know it’s the cartoons reflecting
Back from his eyes, not a sense of the world. So
When he tells me, Daddy it’s okay, I know what’s
Happening is some straggling angel, lost from
His pack finding a way to fulfill his dream,
Breathing breath into this kid who crawls into
My arms, wanting, more than stories of my past, […continue reading here]

/by

Four Poems by Caroline M. Mar (poetry, ’13)

An excerpt from “Ghost Language,” one of four poems by Caroline M. Mar (poetry, ’13)  appearing with an interview, at Connotation Press:

Ghost Language
My grandmother, the white one, my mother’s mother, she has Alzheimer’s.
     It isn’t an easy thing for Grammie, or my mother, or me. My grandfather,
the Chinese one, my father’s father, it was the same: he lost his English, then his mind;
     the ghosts all came to pace his hallways.
Things I know about ghosts: the haunting, of course.
     We bring Grammie mini-candy bars, the tiny shiny squares of sweet she loves,
and honestly it might not be so terrible, a quick and painful heart attack since she’s forgotten
     she wanted to end it before things got this bad.
That sometimes, ghosts have voices. I was . . . I was a smart woman—
     a writer, as deliberate in her choice of words as in her choice of pearls.
Her language never failed her. My students speak a language I don’t always understand. It rings
     of false bravado, a high-striker hammer dropping to prove some mewling manhood.
That ghosts spoke to you more clearly than I could, at the end.
     I teach the code’s switch, the value of speaking both vernacular
and academic, the only way they’ll make it past entry-level at Foot Locker. But also,
     the way those ghosts were welcome, and weren’t you happy to see them,
so happy to have back all the people you’d loved, together, like a reunion.
     I am supposed to value their home language, the way my father,
ghetto-C-Town born, still says It’s mines. She does. Does. Not “do.”
     Godammit, just speak right. […continue reading here]
/by

God, Maybe, a new book from Trish Reeves (poetry, ’83)

An excerpt from God, Maybe, a new book by Trish Reeves (poetry, ’83) published by Scattering Skies Press:

After Lewis Hine

“PLANS FOR WORK”—AN APPLICATION
TURNED DOWN BY THE FOUNDATION

He would have to count the coal
piece by piece: this boy stone,
this boy slate, this boy a cloud
of soot standing in the shovel
chute close to the ceiling. Darkness,
he’d also have to allow for
darkness walking in form, in
hundreds and hundreds of boys,
billed caps, black smears of noses
and mouths the face
of fuel in Pennsylvania.

“Looking at labor,” he wouldn’t have to
spend every lump of his light
as the breaker boys on the black benches,
feet in slag
and coal clattering down
like 75 cents a day, a lamp on the cap
of the lucky lad.

He would, however,
spot the child’s bend in the backs
of all the boys, coats on, cold
work against the cold. […continue reading here]

/by

Two Poems by Martha Zweig (poetry, ’98)

An excerpt from “Beauty Sleep,” one of two poems by Martha Zweig (poetry, ’98) at Scoundrel Time:

 

 

Beauty Sleep 

Kwitcher bitchin, dad snorted. Shut

yer yap up. I hated the salt
stinging my cheeks, it curdled my sass.

Little blue gas flames itched in the kitchen.
A pudding seethed, the better to set.
Pulpy crushed gripes folded in.

Bard: the excellent thing
in a woman’s her stifled voice.
Her boa: sleek silken throat gag. […continue reading here]

/by

“Icarus Does The Dishes” by Tommye Blount (poetry,’ 13)

An excerpt from “Icarus Does The Dishes” by Tommye Blount (poetry, ’13) at The Kenyon Review:

ICARUS DOES THE DISHES

It leaves a mark when I fall
on the floor of my father’s kitchen.
Only a few days it’s been
of lifting him up from one place,
then putting him down somewhere else,
then driving to work for the late shift
while a nurse looks after him
for five hours, three times a week—
all we can afford. There is no choice;
sometimes, I have to leave him
alone. I ignore the soreness
of the bruise taking shape on my ass,
because these dishes won’t clean themselves
and Father hasn’t had his bath. It embarrasses us,
especially the rolling back of his foreskin,
the veins like tiny stitches on the inside
of a minotaur’s mask, so I let him wash that part
while I look away. He does not see me […continue reading here]

/by

“Young Reflects on Stephen Hawking’s Influence, UNC’s Connections” by Katie Bowler Young (poetry, ’07)

An excerpt from the article “Young Reflects on Stephen Hawking’s Influence, UNC’s Connections” by Katie Bowler Young (poetry, ’07) posted at UNC Global:

 

 

Young Reflects on Stephen Hawking’s Influence, UNC’s Connections

In August 2015, I had a stage manager’s dream role, pulling back a curtain and cuing Stephen Hawking to take the stage. We were at the Waterfront Congress Center in Stockholm, Sweden, where he was to deliver a public lecture, “Quantum Black Holes,” to an audience of more than 3,000 people after being introduced by UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Carol Folt.

Like Professor Hawking, I was in Stockholm for an academic gathering co-sponsored by Carolina, along with the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics (Nordita), an institute co-hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University; the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge; and The Julian Swinger Foundation. The conference was organized through the efforts of Professor Laura Mersini-Houghton, cosmologist and theoretical physicist in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, and her some of her close scientist colleagues.

We were together in Stockholm for a week for the Hawking Radiation Conference, where scientists were grappling with what most of us consider to be inexplicable rules of the universe, a science well outside the boundaries of my experience and knowledge. I had come to be a part of it all through my role as Director of Global Relations for UNC Global, an external relations role with roots in my work as a writer. How a career in writing extended to external relations is a separate matter, but what is important to me about it is the influence that Professor Hawking had on who I am as a writer. Truly, at the core of my love for language, I think of myself as a poet, and in Professor Hawking’s words and being I saw endless metaphors, symbolism and a light I typically associate with literary greatness. […continue reading here]

/by

“Terrarium” by Avra Elliott (fiction, ’15)

An excerpt from the poem “Terrarium” by Avra Elliott (fiction, ’15), published at Fairy Tale Review:

Terrarium

I’ve made the pitcher on my table human again.
Her elegant white neck, belly slightly bloated
with flowers. Candles my mother stole stand
in borrowed silver candlesticks, and I can’t understand
why one has burnt faster than the other.

If I bought these sleek white chairs the same day,
why is one splay-legged, and treacherous?
There are too many dollhouses for a house with no
children. Not enough water in the vase of petulant
blooms. Grass has grown through the bedroom […continue reading here]

/by

Rest, a new book from Margaree Little (poetry, ’12)

An excerpt from the poem “Return” from Rest, the new book by Margaree Little (poetry, ’12),

RETURN

It’s June, the last Saturday in June, when Wendy and I go back again to
search the wash.

In April a doctor found another jaw there, and another jaw means another
person.

Don’t think, thousands crossing every year, hundreds dying, which they are,
don’t think, this is never ending.

There’s a job to do, there’s a plan, there’s one man found by us, his bones
the sheriff left behind: we’ll bring the rest of his body back, and if there’s
another, bring that, too.

We park, walk up by the barbed wire fence and at the gate turn into the
valley, toward the first ridge, the trees brown and low around us, the high
crops of rock rising up after the steep downward walk, the dip between
them where we’ll cross into the second valley.

/by

“Alien” by Brendan Grady (poetry, ’11)

An excerpt from the poem “Alien” by Brendan Grady (poetry ’11) published in Scoundrel Time:

Alien

Hi friend. The Arcadia Machine and Tool .22
fired into your left temporal lobe and now lies
buried in your parent’s yard next to the yellow poppies.

Strange what we bury in language.
The root of temporal is tempus meaning time,
or temporalis meaning temple, which houses the sacred,
the permanent. When you were sober
you’d decline a pint calling your body a temple.

The smell of fresh dirt at the burial seemed to contradict
your theory. A confession: I never understood
your humor, laughed anyways; (also,
I stole photographs from your room.) […continue reading here]

/by

“Inflatable Jesus Might Save Us All” by Emily Sinclair (fiction, ’14)

An excerpt from “Inflatable Jesus Might Save Us All” by Emily SInclair (fiction, ’14) published at The Museum of Americana:

Inflatable Jesus Might Save Us All

One of my first jobs, as a college student in the mid-nineteen eighties, was selling soap at a Crabtree & Evelyn store on New York’s Upper West Side. Across the US, the chain, then less than twenty years old, sold botanically-based soaps, lotions, oils, and powders, all in pretty boxes and containers meant to convey the pleasures of an English garden. By stepping inside one of Crabtree & Evelyn’s cottage-style stores, customers could imagine they’d exchanged familiar malls and streets for another time and place: an Americanized fantasy of Victorian English life, lavender-scented, sheep-filled, and in some inchoate way, better. For some, there is nothing more American than a wish to seem faintly European.

My Crabtree & Evelyn, on Columbus Avenue, was owned by a guy named David, a tall, thin nervous man of about fifty. David was something of a tyrant, sitting in his back office clutching his head as he went over the numbers. As a gesture of goodwill, he regularly employed teenage boys who’d just been released from juvenile hall, and they gazed at us with hope and sullenness as they carried boxes up the steep stairs from the basement to our street-level store. We were not permitted in the basement; the boys were not allowed to linger in the store.

Periodically, David emerged from his office to yell at us about the way we arranged things, about carelessly leaving open boxes on the floor while we stocked the shelves with new inventory. For David, the boxes disrupted the narrative that our products were crafted in some nearby pasture, brought in by horse and carriage.

The store manager was a former opera singer named Ethlouise. She was probably in her forties, a black woman with a creamy voice and a calm demeanor. She wore elegant suits with silk shirts and pearls, as if she were hosting a tea. She, more than anyone, was the person who best embodied the Crabtree & Evelyn brand. […continue reading here]

/by

FOW FORUM

Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

VIEW ALL POSTS  |  SUBMIT YOUR WORK