Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
N C L R ONLINE
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FINALIST, 2015 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY MARYLIN HERVIEUX
The Green Wall 1. Early progressions slip from the grip of buds; constellations of tint iridescent in the warming sun. I watch this slow undertaking and I’m ambivalent about the dissolution of what had been familiar: the back-odor of wood stove fires, flames growing like winter annuals, or the wordlessness of gray mornings when your ghost became incarnate in my mind.
2. Trees pawn old expressions as their congregations mature in green. Soon they’ll wall the small clearing where my house sits, leafed tips allowing a bantam flap of sky. This will be my world, identified by reduction. Everything beyond, a matter of faith.
COURTESY OF ASHEVILLE ART MUSEUM, BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE COLLECTION, GIFT OF THE ARTIST
Winter was unbordered, a canvas without frame, sunsets raveling copper over lineless edges, and I walked through them wind raked, aging, a cross-section of element and exposure trying not to break.
La Foresta, 2005 (monoprint on paper, 19.5x27.63) by Caroline Burton Michahelles
MARYLIN HERVIEUX is originally from Upstate New York but has lived in North Carolina for many years. She was also a finalist in the 2014 Applewhite competition, and her finalist poems appeared in the 2015 online and print editions of NCLR. Her work has also been published in Kakalak: An Anthology of Carolina Poets, Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Literature and Art, the North Carolina Arts Council’s Poets-ofthe-Week Series, and Tar River Poetry. She received an Artist Project Grant from the Orange County Arts Council to teach poetry workshops to various special needs groups in the community.
CAROLINE BURTON MICHAHELLES is a painter and poet. She lives and works in Florence and New York City. She studied with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College and was influenced by his philosophy of painting. She has published poetry in the Pennsylvania Literary Review, and several of her poems are included in Francesco Gurrieri’s book Esercizi di Critica Militante. See more of her work in the Black Mountain College Collection at the Asheville Art Museum.