Creative Writing
Sarah Wyman is the author of Sighted Stones (Finishing Line 2018). Recent poems have appeared in Lightwood Press “Some Rings Don’t Want to Make a Line,” (2020), Ekphrastic Review “Bread Sculpture by Grace Hartigan,” Potomac Review (2020), San Pedro River Review (2020), Tiny Seed (2019), The Sandy River Review “Hudson Lydie” (2019), aaduna (2018), Home Planet News (2017), Lumina, SG Press, (2017) AMP (Spring 2017), Ekphrasis (2017), The Vineyard Gazette (August 2016), Chronogram (June 2015), Petrichor Review 3 (2013), Mudfish 17 (2012). She was a finalist for the Richard Eberhart prize in poetry and the Judith Siegel Pearson poetry award. De Medici Press published her prize-winning chapbook Shared Fruit in 1997. Her poem “Wet Exit” appears in A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill 2013). Codhill press published her book Fried Goldfinch 2021.
Poetry Reading: Next Year’s Words, June 24, 2020
For copies of Sighted Stones (chapbook), click here.
Interview with Bill Berry, Jr., editor of Aaduna (2018)
Odysseus: Lumina 6 a brooch by Jamie Bennett
We knew he didn’t want to find the path,
not after he saw each sunken ship
a hole in the sea tarred over by black blankets
while torches flamed above
and felted shadow rafts floated closer
to the sandy shore.
He made his odyssey as expected,
resisted luscious blossoms,
poked Polyphemus in the eye
so the world spun blind for good.
Did he foresee the suck where Charybdis
coughs up water chestnuts
like loosened teeth?
Deep and dark as a stiff drink
Aegean waters retreated
to let the hero sow his shredded leather in the softened sand.
When he meets the Messina Strait
and feels the heart shrink to a sharpened seedpod,
ready for the plunge,
crouching like an abandoned pin
caught in the tailor’s rug,
a push through to the weft edge
may be all it takes to hurry home.
Lumina, Jewelry by Jamie Bennett, SG Press, 2017.
*
American Spirit
It started with a scent from the bottom corner of a box
sweet and unique, wafting up from earlier days,
my grandmother’s Winstons, first drag before the crushed aftermath
of dirty ashtrays to empty and rinse with small hands.
I smelled the huge leaves hanging from rafters in Durham, North Carolina
where I tried my hand at marriage
and the warm breeze brought tobacco air up the hill from the factory.
Brick kiln buildings sped the slow dry and we peeked in propped windows to see.
Someone sketched the Camel Cigarette logo in the stairwell to the landlord’s pad.
He was always there, humping his way to the landing when I breezed in from class
or maneuvered the stroller over the threshold
gently enough to keep the baby quiet.
I’d like to dive to the bottom of that discarded carton
where a few brown chips breathe their fragrance,
all-natural with a stolen Indian whose feathered pipe declares
some past truth, embossed with the tiny tax code I’d pay to travel back
to where air mixed in the smoke and the lid still fit.
*
Dead Bird
up the tree housed in plywood
no one could find a space
see where a bird cap slaughtered by the dawn
left half under mulch that creeps light in predictably
had surrendered its feathers to smear a message
scalped red star pointing south west at once
with black backbones arrow aviaries
to each frond now flattened as though the route were doomed
is it a squirrel running over thick roots
that tumbles a dry seed flexing muscled bark arms
down the polymer roof to dirt declivities
or the wind’s glancing puff blows blown loam
as the pressure rises too wet to fly
and gray storm clouds that journey ended.
roll in?
