Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
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HONORABLE MENTION, 2015 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY FLORENCE NASH
At Blue Banks In the woods above Bell’s Bridge there’s a deep-sliced curve of river bank where old folks string the water with their trotlines in the day-long shade, and the warden never comes. Big shad hover close in season, and the smell is of clay and leaf-rot. I know someone who goes there, tools bundled in his canoe. He slides downstream along the steep bank rearing from the river, digs through cross-hatch of root and bramble for giant shark’s teeth, knuckled scallop shells, once a vertebra big as a bucket, phalanges from big fins that have not fluttered in two hundred million years. This is flat fields and plain facts country. Sunday preachers thump their Bibles, red-faced and sweating with conviction, and summon down the unassailable Word, while the river runs on slow and muddy through the woods, patiently carving out its counter-proposition.
FLORENCE NASH, a writer and editor for Duke Medical Center until her retirement, has directed Duke’s OLLI poetry workshop since 2000. She is a past winner of the Blumenthal Writers and Readers Award and was an invited Emerging Poet at Vanderbilt University’s Millennial Gathering of Writers of the New South. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, she is a member of the Black Socks Poets and has published two collections of poetry released by Gravity Press, Crossing Water (1996) and Fish Music (2010). Four of Nash’s poems were finalists in the 2015 Applewhite Poetry Prize competition; read the other two in the 2016 print issue.
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