40
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2016 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY KRISTI CARTER
Not many can comprehend what it is to stare into the knot of the yew darkened by its hollow, without memory of emerging. This is the beginning of the muscle in my neck sculpted by a lifetime of looking back. These are the sinews of aspiration: the ligament wishes it could be the eye of God, the only organ that can remember things with neutrality.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
The Cosmology of the Daughter Who Emerged from an Unrecognizable Place
After a youth under the canopy of dying trees, I emerged from the forest without an age. People surrounded me but left on sight, mistaking me for stone. If I could remember what I was cleft from, perhaps I would shatter into my base elements: iron and clay and silt from a river that doesn’t run through this part of the country. Not many can comprehend what it is to turn and find the path you started down is not the paved myth of adulthood, but some gravel anonymity unmarked by man. Not many can stand at the mouth of discovery without the slim flume of lightning that travels down the spine, the fear that something new could be known.
KRISTI CARTER, a native of Stokes County, NC, received a BA from Appalachian State University before going on to earn an MFA from Oklahoma State University. Currently a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, her poems have appeared in So to Speak, PMS poemmemoirstory, CALYX, and Hawai’i Review.
Aquí Siempre Hay Más Sol, 2015 (ceramic, metal, resin, 63x35) by Cristina Córdova
CRISTINA CÓRDOVA received a BA from the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez and an MFA in Ceramics from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. In 2002 she entered a three-year artist residency program at Penland School of Crafts where she later served on the board of trustees from 2006 to 2010. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2015 USA Artist Fellowship, an American Crafts Council Emerging Artist Grant, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Virginia Groot Foundation Recognition Grant, and several International Association of Art Critics Awards. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico, the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico, and the Joseph-Schein Museum in New York. She currently lives and works in Penland, NC. See more of her work on her website.