110
2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2015 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY MARLY YOUMANS
From Rave, a sequence of poems inspired by Yoruban oríkì
Anniversary Song
Man of delicate quills for quilting, Man of cassoulet and 3-day croissant, Man who repairs antique tin toys, Man who kills a lion in the bush, Man who climbs to cliff’s ledge, Skinning the mountain goat and drowsing all night On the edge of precipice – I call that grizzly wrap-sandwich – Man who can leap to naming the darks of disease, Who sets pin lines along the nerves, Follows the firing like a military map, Man-once-boy in a valley of blue collars, Boy told he would never amount, never count, Boy-man who scaled the world’s walls on his fingernails, Out of the valley’s blue-collar humus, Painted his way, wrote his way, acted his way, Declaring his future to the mockers, Wrestling his way, hurling his body upward. Man who wanders the world, who Eats fried plantains on Bangkok corners, Who teaches spinal tap in a Hanoi clinic, Who muses over bog bodies in Sweden, Walks volcanic flow in the Pacific sun, Clambers snowy rocks in Kyrgyzstan. He is only a man, no longer long haired and blond, No longer of the beautiful torso, No longer virile every hour on the hour, No longer the dream, the Apollo, the boy Sun – No, but himself in all his strangeness and magic So that I shake my head, laughing, and say What a boy, what a trek, what a man.
Read more about MARLY YOUMANS with the review of her latest novel in this issue. More poems from this series were also finalists in the James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition and will be published in the NCLR 2016 print issue.
From Nigeria, Yoruba ere ibeji male figure, with camwood powder, beads, and a fine handling patina (wood)