POET OF THE WEEK: TERRI KIRBY ERICKSON

Discovering a new poet whose work I really enjoy is like finding the perfect Christmas gift under the tree, something I've been thinking about lately, as the holiday season approaches. Terri Kirby Erickson is such a poet, and her new book of poems would make the perfect for gift for readers on your Christmas gift list. That Terri is a native North Carolinian and published by a Winston-Salem publisher, Press 53, only makes discovering her "more perfect." (Poetic license, there!)

Terri is an award winning poet. Her first poetry collection, Thread Count, was published in 2006. Telling Tales of Dusk was published in 2009 by Press 53. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, literary journals and anthologies, including A Prairie Journal, Blue Fifth Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Dead Mule, JAMA, Muse India, Oak Bend Review, Nibble, Paris Voice, Pisgah Review, Relief, Thieves Jargon, Toasted Cheese, Smoking Poet, Wild Goose Poetry Review and many others. In 2009, she was nominated for a Best of the Net Award and a Pushcart Prize. She has lectured at both the high school and university level, and has conducted numerous poetry workshops. Terri lives in Lewisville, NC . She has a beautiful website and welcomes her readers to visit:
http://terrikirbyerickson.wordpress.com/
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Terri's first book, Thread Count, was published AuthorHouse in 2006

Excerpts from Telling Tales of Dusk( 8.5 x 5.5 paperback, $12.00, www.press53.com)

Queen Anne’s Lace

Queen Anne’s lace dandies up
a ditch, like embroidered hankies
in a farmer’s pocket.

Such tiny seed-pearl petals
seem hand-sewn by
seraphim to their purple

centers—yet they thrive
in common places, fine as tatted
borders, blanket-stitched to burlap.

Papa Never Learned to Read

Granny sat under a shade tree,
fanning herself with corn shucks,

while Papa stood waist-deep in

the river, baptizing. Folks rose up,
sputtering, and waded back to shore—

their sodden dresses and pant legs

heavy against their skin, their souls
light as Easter lilies. “I see no need

for such as that,” Granny said, to

anyone who asked. Still, she read
Papa scripture—the words warmed

by her breath and scattered into his

brain like dandelion seeds—where
once a week, they grew into a sermon.

Washing My Baby’s Hair over the Kitchen Sink

There is the weight of her small, solid head in my hand
and the feel of warm water, sluicing through her hair.
Eyes the soft blue-gray of herons’ wings,
follow my new-mother face, glowing.
Enthralled with each other, we
coo like doves in the milk-
scented air that my baby
breathes out and I
breathe
in.


County Fair

Pulled like rotten teeth from the open mouths
of mineshafts, massive pyramids of gleaming
coal dot the landscape of Kanawha County.
Coal dust fine and black as pulverized midnight,
covers everything for miles. Rows of ramshackle
houses kneel by the river like washer women
with their knees in river muck, and jagged
mountains cut the slate-gray sky

to ribbons. But the Kanawha River is long
and winding, and leads to a lone Ferris wheel
rising up from the bottomland, jaunty
as an Easter bonnet. Its rainbow-colored gondolas
call to mind a different tune than the dismal dirges
of Black Lung and White Damp. They carry the sound
of children’s laughter through the ground
and into the mines, like light.

BETTER WITH FRIENDS, by Helen Losse

Cover by Bill Losse



Better With Friends
Rank Stranger Press (2009)
$14.00 plus $2.50 S & H ($16.50)

send check with your mailing address and any instructions for personalization to:

Helen Losse
2569 Wood Valley Road
Winston-Salem, NC 27106


About the Author

Helen Losse is a poet, free lance writer, and Poetry Editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Her recent poetry publications include The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Shape of a Box, Lily, Ghoti, Right Hand Pointing, and Blue Fifth Review. She has two chapbooks, Gathering the Broken Pieces, available from FootHills Publishing and Paper Snowflakes, available from Southern Hum Press. Educated at Missouri Southern State and Wake Forest Universities, she lives with her husband in Winston-Salem, NC where she occasionally writes book reviews for literary magazines.

"I moved like a poet—laboring—/under the weight of the burden of truth," Helen Losse declares in the first poem from Better With Friends. A poet does indeed labor, but in a poem, what is the truth? Losse shows us the unrelenting details of decline and death in "The Kidnapping of Aimee." The soiled sheets, the stench of old age, the waiting upon death, but these details are not the only "truth" in this or any of other poem in this collection. How does the spirit shine through the labors of time? How does soul dance with the world given to us--family, friends, suffering, pleasure? Losse shows us how in these poems, rich as they are in the details that embody our lives. This is indeed the poet's labor brought to fruition. KSB



Imagine

So I begin again in solitude
on the morning of the first day in January.

The sky is dark, and the Christmas tree not
yet removed. Gently the rain starts falling,

making the trunks of the back-yard trees
barely visible. A light shines in a window.

An American flag on a pole
blows in the breeze. The pole is beside the house

across the right of way. I’ve not noticed that flag
before. Perhaps, it’s a Christmas flag. One our

neighbors got as a gift, and just now—
in the new year—found the time to install.

When the wind stops blowing, the flag disappears,
and all I see is a yard full of trees. So did

anything change while I slept? I
imagine a garden with a wrought iron gate.

The gate opens to a world in which
John Lennon is a younger man. I see, too,

the famous “Godfather of Soul,”
humming to yellow roses:

Humming the prayer of my heart:
O my God, to see.


To Be

A house is visible behind the right of way.
I hate that house, and sometimes, when it
disappears in the fog, pretend it isn’t there.

I sit in my chair and look into the yard.
I imagine I belong. But this morning
after the yard was white with snow—

later when the brown grass emerged from its
hiding like a flag newly un-furled—
the house snickered. “Over here,” it called,

waving and fluttering its shutters,
hoping for eye contact like our patulous neighbor
with her other seasonal and too-tight pants.
 

Prayer At the Open Window

In the solitude, I ponder life’s meaning.
I have looked but not really seen.
Because a window is open

does not mean the air is full of light.
Perhaps, I have played too many games—
evenings and mornings,

drinking in foolishness with my coffee—
and failed to heed a lesson given. Or,
perhaps, I barely listened. But I’m

asking now. There is so much to ponder,
as I gaze upon the tree line,
where just last week another doe came

bolting through the yard. At first,
I thought it was a dog. But no dog leaps
with such magnificence. No, not even

the greyhound. I know that. I see that.
So why not the rest? If there’s really
an answer for every question,

no mystery behind heaven’s gate, then I have
argued and lost. Surely, something
hides in the darkness like a shadow in the fog.

Thrown Out
—for Alice

How many times has the wind sung
new verses to our familiar choruses,

we’ve seen only the clouds
and misread the signs?

We seek peace in a mirror. And looking,
when we should have been listening,

missed prophetic thunder
in the blackening of trees.

But new birth accents the possible,
disguised in the freshness of a sudden, spring rain.

The time has come
to throw out spoiled milk.

There are evergreens already,
birds singing low in the brush.

Yet how many nights
have we slept on old, cotton sheets,

clinging to comfortable tintypes,
content with the smaller of joys?



On the Other Side of the River

Rumor has it, God lives
on the opposite side of the river,

stands on the cliff
near a tree-covered gorge,

charges past slippery rocks
into slime that looks like moss.

The river’s wide
with turbulent rapids.

Some, below in the water,
have enough buoyancy to float.

Not many.

A skiff is moored nearby,
and sharp branches

jut from the shore.
And from what I see

near the river’s shallow edge,
it appears that God is not at home.


Whirlybirds

We always called maple seeds whirlybirds,
just as we always did so many things, as children.
We liked them best when they were yellow—

when tossed alone, in twos, or even bunches—
they came swirling down. Too green,
they fell with a plop. Too brown, too thin to fly,

or they fell apart, exposing their spider veins
like the vertical strings on a badminton racket.
If we had rain, mush, beside the welcome mat.

But this morning, sailing swiftly by my window,
catching the light—white and lovely,
delicate of drift—landing in a driveway crack

or in gutters in the fertile loam that once was
other maple leaves, those ’copters from the sky—
unshaken in purpose—became a circle of trees.

Smithfield Poetry Workshop: Teresa McLamb Blackmon

(Teresa McLamb Blackmon)


MEMO TO TEACHERS: THE POEMS FEATURED IN THIS POST WOULD MAKE WONDERFUL ASSIGNMENTS. I'D BE WILLING TO BET YOU'D GET SOME GOOD STUDENT WRITING IN RESPONSE TO THEM. SEND YOUR STUDENTS TO THIS BLOG AND ENCOURAGE THEM TO LEAVE SOME COMMENTS FOR ME. YOU CAN LEAVE SOME, TOO!



Another member of the Smithfield workshop was Teresa McLamb Blackmon. I had met Teresa a three years ago while conducting a seminar at the NC Center for the Advancement of Teaching. When I took a look at her poetry, I knew she was the real thing. She was able to bring small town and Eastern North Carolina rural life into full sensory life in a way that reminded me a lot of Shelby Stephenson.(www.shelbystephenson.com) And why not? She grew up where Shelby now lives--in the small town of Benson, North Carolina, where her father was a farmer and rodeo stock contractor and her mother a 3rd grade teacher. Teresa is a Media/Technology Coordinator in Johnston County. Earlier in her career, she taught high school English and Yearbook Journalism. She graduated from NCSU in 1984 with a MA in English and is an avid Wolfpack fan. Teresa lives on a farm near Benson with her husband and their four-legged babies, including dogs, miniature donkeys, horses, Brahma bulls, goats, and sheep. Her writing is an attempt to capture those people and places around Johnston County who shaped her life and her drive to create poetry. She has had poems published in Absinthe and in various local newspapers and community publications.





DELIVERY

I could never forget the climb
as tedious as Jack and the Beanstalk’s journey,
into the pickup truck where Daddy waited,
brimmed hat bent down, blue eyes
watching, reaching without arms
for me and the morning’s route.
We slipped through town, partners
with the yellow thief, to rob the
dew and set the day afoot.
“One quart for the Lamberts,” he’d say,
“and two for Old Man Webb.”
They slept, unaware that a child
had come to bring the milk,
warm in its glass cocoon, and a
father watched, knowing that
the empty bottles left, like sentinels in the night,
would come back to him;
tiny hands would bring them.

❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄


THE LEAP

It was not the jump that scared me,
kept me stone-still, frozen in sun.
I knew the air was safe though quick
With slick hands supple.
I could bear the bounce, could look
up and know I would find water.

It was the landing, not sure that the
plunge would take me to the bottom
and up again with breath to spare.
It was the falling into something bigger than me,
something that would surround me
like loose clothing I could not stretch to fit.

Would mid-air strand me like a
dead letter sent with good intentions,
lose me in clouds and storm me away?
Would I scatter in heat and cheat
the wetness, not diving at all but
lingering like a petticoat of steam
over children submerged in cool water?

That fear schooled me, swam me like
circling bubbles in the bathtub drain, me
so afraid of leaving the board, I’d bob
up an down like impatient bait,
watching myself in the blue mirror,
seeing a stranger I knew so well.

❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄


ONE WEEK BEFORE

Grandma lies dying, sucking breath like sun in snow,
leaving paths behind.
Her eyes doze in sockets closed from light: an eclipse.
We watch her twitch in bed and hear her groans;
they rattle and wheeze while we stand above her
like prison guards. Her chains smolder and spit fire.
They dazzle us with a strange pageantry—she is breaking loose.

❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄

MULES

I do not know mules like Grandpa did,
the gee-whinney,
the swish tune of fanning tail,
the shake of ears at flies
and green leaf flowers tickling.

Grandpa closed his eyes
back to that land
down beyond the fishing pond,
the sand slipping under tow-bagged sleds
he made with cola caps,
the mule, head down,
plodding back rows level.

Back to that fertile soil,
sweat and sweeping gardens
on backyard plots,
an old straw hat set to tilt the sun,
and mule muscles pulling and stretching
a day’s work,
when hours played in shadow, passing in the quiet.

“Were they really stubborn?”
“’Bout like children. You had to know how to handle them.”

❄❄❄❄❄❄❄


SEASONS

This might be the year of leaving,
this time when nothing
has the leisure of waiting.
Tree branches bare, a little fox scurries
for fish perished on the dam.
The moon, perched on sky smooth as tabletops,
sits like an empty cup to be filled.
Dusk brings the smell of earth,
as farmers return to fallow fields,
pull up the fruits of vine,
swiftly yanking roots and stems
as if the planting had been a mistake.
I live in this picture, a shadow near the bottom,
hovering like the catfish in winter mud,
just because the moment tempts beyond reason.
I write my life in small letters near the time that frames it all.

❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄❄



READY TO TELL

I try to tell the story word for word, play by play,
sit here straight-back chair and keyboard,
fingers waiting for moves
like two at a checkerboard.
All the characters are backstage:
Dixie and Bob, Mama, AnnieMae, Aunt Grace;
they are ready and nervous not a bit
about their debut, knowing this production
was inevitable.
Many wait in the wings, for their calling.
I’ve cast this scene a thousand times.
The stage is set, all props within reach,
like something a magician might pull
from a tall black hat.
The woman in the back row sits uncomfortably;
she is afraid it will be her story too,
as if there ever is but one
story of a life.
There is no curtain for there never was a need
for hiding,
as if long lengths of cloth could separate the view,
the seen from the unseen.
The lights are down and I am ready,
to step out, take my place at the center.

Let me tell you about growing up in a small town,
about barning tobacco and going to Sunday school.
We could walk the whole of Main Street
and never meet a stranger.
Tobacco worms wiggled through our fingers.
We could go to Miss Johnny Green’s little store
in “colored town,”
buy candy cigarettes and later real ones,
and know she’d never tell.
We made sand castles at Carolina Beach and
cried when the week was over at Camp Don Lee.
We played spin the bottle and took our kisses
in “Miss” Louise Godwin’s living room closet.
We ate cherry pies we honestly believed
“Miss” Lily made from scratch.
We lost Mary Lynn to a train and Danny to pond water.
We played Rook and cruised Charlie’s Carousel
in a Caprice Estate Station Wagon.
We believed that Wilhelmenia Utley was a witch and
that Debbie Dale Peacock had all the answers to our questions
about sex.

I will tell you all about these lives we’ve lived
right in front of your very eyes,
if you will listen:
you will know us every one.