Current Issue - Fall, 2007
Cover photo by Scott Ludwig
EXCERPTS
On the Way to Drink My Lunch
by Chuck Sullivan
From an old
stone bridge
overlooking
the Catawba
Thursday noon
is a stream
in which
the current
week long rain
has broken water
to a new-born
sun skinning
the river alive
About the Author: Chuck Sullivan’s books of poems are Vanishing Species, A Catechism of Hearts, A Dream of Lions, The Juggler on the Radio, Longing for the Harmonies, and Alphabet of Grace. In 1996 he co-founded Moving Poets Theatre of Dance, a professional performing arts company. He is currently Poet-in-Residence in North and South Carolina. Every summer since 1979, he teaches poetry and philosophy at North Carolina Governor’s School East, where he is chairman of the English Department.
Failures
by Betty Adcock
I wanted to give you a singing,
a tree of your own, something
with hands.
You are tall in my dress,
my prayer for forgetting.
My fingers fumbled the gifts we needed:
the furrow undone by winter, a summer tough as a turtle.
My daughter, I have given you windows
with darkness behind them.
The luck I’ll have is sharp with what you 1ost.
I hear it breaking on and on like glass.
About the Author: Betty Adcock is author of five books of poems from LSU Press, most recently Intervale: New and Selected Poems, finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize as well as co-winner of the 2003 Poets’ Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2002-2003, she teaches at Meredith College and at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Adcock has won North Carolina’s Governor’s Medal for Literature, and the Texas Institute of Letters Prize. She was Distinguished Visiting Professor at North Carolina State University in 2003.