A Girl Endures the Poetry Reading
Rent from DeepDyve- A Girl Endures the Poetry Reading
She broadcasts her misery like touch-me-not seeds. Hands flattened against her eyes and face, as if suffering a migraine, she endures, just barely, this talk of mill towns and apple orchards and boggy sloughs . . . (God!) And everything desolate. Always ancient orchards and abandoned mill towns. . . And still they spit out poets before their ultimate decline.
Oh, the agony of other people’s stories, pulled from childhoods so outrageously boring that mention of hillside plows and dewy grass, cow piss and ironweed, have at this very moment of hers, her childhood, resulted in bursts of pain so publicly excruciating she can’t see straight, much less realize, that her headache may well be coming from the pressure of a voice calling for some life older than this. [End Page 85]
Jeffrey Hicks Morgan teaches high school English at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. This is his first published poem, inspired by a trip to the 2012 Carolina Mountains Literary Festival in Burnsville, North Carolina, his wife’s hometown.
