38
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
North Carolina, This Will Be The Last Poem by Samantha Lee Deal
2012 James Applewhite Poetry Prize finalist I’ll write for you, because there’s no trying to tell you anything you don’t already know and I think you like it when I can’t think about you without thinking about my mother changing sheets and the sweeping lift of her arms and the slow float of the fabric. You know how we left things. I moved to Boston with you dragging behind me like a shadow at noon on the summer solstice in Alaska. I missed you all the time and I won’t explain it because it will sound like everything you’ve heard before but do you remember what Jeffrey looked like blowing smoke out his crooked sidewalk smile and laughing when I tried to explain about us. Oh, he said, you miss crickets. He’s married now and I think that time has to exist because he wasn’t married then and because our white cat died by the same pond where I used to catch crawdads. My mother said it took a full day for the cat to go. It took Uncle Charlie two years and I can say that all this happened while I was gone, but I can’t say I forgive you. I’m fairly certain it’s because of you that my sadness is never appropriate. You know how the grass burns out in the piedmont in August? I know people who want to die like that, because surviving’s not the same as living and nothing about you is the same
number 22