Adrienne J. Odasso What I Can Get Don't ask me to visit here in winter. It doesn't exist before the season when the land, stretching, breaks the icy fever of sleep. The graves and gardens dream of spring; the dust and roses
Unbound
sing of dawning in the darkness of unbeing. At this time of year comes the breath of change, the waking
Some wildness in the wind, some chance says we've come to it. As I sit shivering down to my splintered bones,
to pain. The pleasure of being
the house havers, weathered by the slightest of storms. My lip splits with the knife-edged chill,
in a place is precisely
unguarded in one soft moment of hope. These grave gusts cannot save my life or my breath, but these hands
the pleasure I take.
parched and pinning this paper to the trembling floor will surely for our captors mean nothing
What It Is
short of death.
The town's what it is because they're in it, because of the blueberries in the brush that my grandfather planted one summer before they took the fox and shot the thrush, which ate my grandmother's jam-making crop off the brambles, because night on Summit Street seethes with firefly-streaks above the drop down to where my father swam the river while they tamed the fox and named it Lady, my uncle played jazz and shot pool down the ditch that almost had his brother when a deer crossed his path in the splendor of the half-moon on my mother's white face, the babe she caught that night on the water
Adrienne J. Odasso is currently completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of York (UK). Her poetry has previously appeared in publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including Strong Verse, Sybil's Garage, Farrago's Wainscot, Aesthetica, Succour, and Mythic Delirium. Her short fiction has appeared in Behind the Wainscot and in the Ruins Terra anthology from Hadley Rille Books, with new work forthcoming in two anthologies from Drollerie Press (Needles & Bones and Straying from the Path). Her first print chapbook, Devil's Road Down, will be published by Maverick Duck Press in September, and her first book-length collection, Lost Books, will be published in Winter 2010 by Flipped Eye Press.
because the town's what it is, what we are.
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