In the spring of 2020, Watershed Review published my poem “Nearby There Is a Field,” along with “Emergency Room,” and “Echo.” WR continues to publish beautiful work online, including this little gem by Amorak Huey in the fall of 2023:
This season, poet Marjorie Maddox has been hosting a four-minute radio show on WPSU, focusing on Pennsylvania poets. Every Monday a new episode of Poetry Moment comes out, and you can read and listen online at that link. I’m so honored to have had one of my pieces featured along with poets like Ross Gay, Nicole Miyashiro, Brian Fanelli, and fellow Seven Kitchens Press mate, Rebecca Lauren.
The photo here is one that I had to dig for, but it is the actual field mentioned in the poem. I wish I had thought to catch the cemetery in the picture as well. Many thanks to Marjorie Maddox for her kind words and her lovely reading of my poem. Click here for a listen.
Nearby There Is a Field
of flowers, a wild congregation of color,
bordering Valley Road and the graveyard.
But in this place where you stay,
the walls are barren. Fluorescent halls
empty into rooms that smell of sweat
and solvent. Something unnamable
lingers in heavy curtains, permeates
linoleum. Nothing here like a flower,
nothing green or growing. In that field
between farmland and ridge, the wind
bends each bloom and breaks against
the headstones. That isn’t right; it doesn’t
break, it wraps around the names it
cannot think to say. It whistles, mindless.
It has no plan. As I stand in the hall
outside your room, there is a girl sprawled
on the floor and crying. There is wildness here
that empty walls deny. Storms blow through us.
If I had a choice, I’d be wind through the valley,
bending what I could, bowing where I had to.
But here in the hall, with the girl in tears,
I am stone and blank. Not columbine
or lavender. Not chamomile or yarrow,
bitterweed or aster. Nothing like a flower.
Originally published in Watershed Review, Spring/Fall 2020
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