Before the Fetus Proves Viable, a Stroll Creekside in the Sierras
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Before the Fetus Proves Viable, a Stroll Creekside in the Sierras
It seems every one is silvered, dead, until we learn to see the living— beaked males and females clutching their hundred thousand roe— working muscle, fin, and scale against the great laws of the universe— current, gravity, obsolescence, and the bears preparing for their torpor, clawing the water for weeks, this rich feed better than any garbage bin—and these still living red ones, who made it past all that, nuzzling toward a break in the current, everything about them moving, moving yet hardly moving forward at all. [End Page 787]
Camille T. Dungy is author of three books of poems, Suck on the Marrow, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, and Smith Blue, which won the Crab Orchard Open Book Prize. She is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, which won the 2010 Northern California Book Awards Special Recognition Prize; co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great; and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. The National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Cave Canem, the Dana Award, Bread Loaf, the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and the Library of Virginia Literary Award have all acknowledged her extraordinary contributions to and promotion of contemporary American literature. She is currently a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.
