FEATURED POET Carol Alexander’s poetry appears in anthologies including Broken Circles (Cave Moon Press), Through a Distant Lens (Write Wing Publishing) and Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Vol. 1. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in numerous print and online journals such as Bluestem, Caesura, Chiron Review, The Common, The New Verse News, Southern Humanities Review, and Soundings East. She is the author of the chapbook BRIDAL VEIL FALLS (Flutter Press). HABITAT LOST was Alexander’s first full-length collection of poems released by Cave Moon Press. She just completed her second full-length collection ENVIRONMENTS published by Dos Madres Press. These poems were included in HABITAT LOST. We're excited to see what she has in her next collection! An interview about the first collection can be accessed by Spring River Review
Anatomy
In darkness we steal bodies in plain grave clothes.
Freshly dead, eyes membranous, modest;
it seems almost a crime to snatch a pauper’s rest.
By candlelight we explore their crevices--
four-chambered heart, leguminous kidney, muddy entrails.
We will learn all they’ve eaten, posthumously.
We whisper, cajole; they stare back furiously, knowing they’ve been tricked.
Are silage for our greening field.
We thought only of the kiss of life.
One draws with the silken feather of a goose
coils of dank viscera while another lifts a lung, imagines a sigh.
Purple-black blossoms on the anterior skin—
this love of everlasting, this anoxia.
All you beauties.
Within, the roil of internecine gases and salt,
a great ship splitting at the hull . A quick draft of stale beer
before we leave them lonely in the dawn.
Freshly dead, eyes membranous, modest;
it seems almost a crime to snatch a pauper’s rest.
By candlelight we explore their crevices--
four-chambered heart, leguminous kidney, muddy entrails.
We will learn all they’ve eaten, posthumously.
We whisper, cajole; they stare back furiously, knowing they’ve been tricked.
Are silage for our greening field.
We thought only of the kiss of life.
One draws with the silken feather of a goose
coils of dank viscera while another lifts a lung, imagines a sigh.
Purple-black blossoms on the anterior skin—
this love of everlasting, this anoxia.
All you beauties.
Within, the roil of internecine gases and salt,
a great ship splitting at the hull . A quick draft of stale beer
before we leave them lonely in the dawn.
For Ghislaine
For Ghislaine
By the board, pupils like black holes, a North Philadelphia schoolgirl, three years in fifth grade, is fragged by the laughter of the back row. The word is Chesapeake, as in the bay. Cheapskate, she tries, bringing down fire.
Desks etched with curses and pleas, oaken stupor of midday, waxy boxes of cool milk, but she gives off the heat of moving targets, stumbling in the
crosshairs. Rungs of chairs implacable, first frost muffles light beneath the blackout shade.We are in the Cold War and could lose even this weak light.
Ghislaine, I wonder at the ignorance: mother plaiting your dark hair, sending you into the tangle of the day, struggles with small hostages. The courage of it, the march to the front lines, the bloodied heels in boots.
My daughter rises now at six, laptop crammed with lesson plans. She greets children off the short bus, who hardly speak, who twirl, who flap, who cool their heels in the special room. Work well, I say, for Ghislaine, who must be sixty-three, a grandmother in a street of houses, peaceful now, this winter day.
In this
WRITE YOUR POEM
Intimacy. Poetry, whether out of ancient China, or with Carol allows the reader to connect to the quiet moments that we want to remember out of the roar of dark busyness that drives our every day existence. "My daughter rises now at six...." Carol tells us. Someone was watching. Write your poem. Eschew the promulgation of formal poetic forms....(in text language my son says I now have to say, jk...) All the writers that help us learn repeat the mantra of simplify, simplify, simplify. Simplify your modifiers. Simplify your purpose. Simplify your audience. It is through that discipline that the words strike the reader. Write your poem.
