vol. 1, 2007
William Wright
1.
Summer sky an old onion.
Over the fence flares of pink trumpets.
Bees wheel about their coral bells, fly off.
2.
I am meat, salt, water.
In my skull hums
a three pound sentient chunk.
When I kiss my mother’s hair,
a sleeping giant’s heart blooms, collapses.
He shifts in his sleep and smiles,
mica flashing.
One day he’ll look me in the eye.
3.
A fleet of cumulus leans away.
Freighted with rain, bees drop
to the freshened grass,
sweet clover.
Trumpet Creeper Variations IV
1.
He was five years old when my great uncle Basil died
on a farmhouse floor in Iredell County, North Carolina,
half his face boiled from his skull.
Quilts and winter storms
broke my great-grandmother
to miseries of bone and a scorched gown,
pre-dawn dimness on a copper cauldron
that held the lye he tipped and spilled,
his little fingers charred,
hard as rust.
2.
Sleeves of corn stalks flapped and clattered,
ash in the chimney flue, plum jelly’s bright jar.
My grandfather turned, eyes fusing.
3.
As the calyx
unsheathes a petal,
as the hand holds
the scalded hand,
furled leaf,
heat to breathe and bear.
As water scars deep grain,
cottonmouths uncurl
over roots that twine my kin
to smilax and larkspur:
the stream’s clear coil.
Bluebird
--For James Howell
Morning’s windfall light flecks this chapel of bone.
Houseflies drone, scatter alms, minor chords
strummed in stained grass:
Up close the inside becomes Byzantine,
a palm-sized vault, ribs rows of pews.
Out of the body burst ants and their sanctity
to clip the plum lungs
and heart,
bear the flesh home.
Ghost Water
We enter the pond during a night of glassy corners:
Frost toughens the grass, slows red oaks
until leaves unlock. The last of minnows
like gray brushstrokes. We turn home
to see what’s abandoned—
windowlight, Mason jars, blue corymbs of hydrangea,
fading like our skin that brushes past cicada husks,
snake skins, old burdens shucked. Death smells
like wood-smoke and clay, apple and ash,
thick as the slush our feet plume
near dank knuckles of water roots, mosquito eggs,
crane feathers trembling in shadows of bass.
Toads thrash the shore and plop into duckweed.
When we dive, the water sings away
the stories of our bodies,
our throats opened: grandmother’s evening dress
drifts into the dark; grandfather opens his arms
in exaltation or dismay, all of us sinking below
circling gar and algal blooms
to where horse bones
shift in the slow pull, to the rich mud we take up
and eat, our mouths ripening
like white fire.
Author’s Bio:
WILLIAM WRIGHT was raised in Edgefield, South Carolina. He has a full-length collection of poems, Dark Orchard, published by Texas Review Press and winner of the 2005 Breakthrough Poetry Prize. Recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in North American Review, Colorado Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Orleans Review, Texas Review, Cimarron Review, and Poet Lore, among others. He is founding editor of Town Creek Poetry (www.towncreekpoetry.com) as well as co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, the South Carolina volume recently published by Texas Review Press. Wright is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers, where he has recently helped edit the first special poetry issue of Southern Quarterly.