Child
A thumbprint lifted off some dumb ancestor.
One summer night, I left my typewriter in a van,
dug up hostas, the blue angels,
from a coniferous thicket on south campus.
Smelled the vixen curled in underground heat.
Then home, whelmed, Russian novels double stacked,
the yard’s bald patch, balm withheld.
My invisible awns teasing rain from the wind,
infant lodged over the pubic bone.
✶✶✶✶
Carol Alexander is co-editor of the anthology Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022). She is the author of the poetry collections Blue Vivarium, Fever and Bone, Environments, and Habitat Lost. Her poems appear or will appear in About Place Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, Asheville Poetry Review, Bluestem, Burningword Literary Journal, The Common, The Comstock Review, Cumberland River Review, Denver Quarterly, Free State Review, Mudlark, NELLE, Narrative Northeast, New World Writing Quarterly, One, Potomac Review, RHINO Poetry, San Pedro River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Summerset Review, Southern Humanities Review, Third Wednesday, Verdad, Western Humanities Review, and Verse Daily.
✶
JC Alfier’s (they/them) poetic sensibilities run astride backroads and marginal regions, toward the déclassé—those haggards of rural and urban loneliness. They are the author of The Shadow Field (Louisiana Literature Press), and their work has appeared in Faultline, Fugue, New Delta Review, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, and Vassar Review. Their collage art is influenced by photo-artists Toshiko Okanoue, Francesca Woodman, Deborah Turbeville, and Katrien De Blauwer. Like Saul Leiter, they love imperfections, unguarded moments, and the belief that the real world has more to do with what is hidden than what is open.
✶
Whenever possible, we link book titles to Bookshop.org, an independent bookselling site. As a Bookshop affiliate, Another Chicago Magazine earns a small percentage from qualifying purchases.
