North Carolina Literature and the Other Arts
N C L R ONLINE
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FINALIST, 2016 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY SUSAN LEFLER
Getting from Here to There
line of a map. Think of a woman walking in dead leaves, how they crunch to mark her steps, how she smells decay and loss, remembering
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Consider the snail that leaves its silver trail by dragging its flat foot across a stone; imagine following it, as if along the thin
deep roots beneath, bulbs that swell and break, push through the very dirt the leaves become. She sees spikes jumbled amid rotted railroad ties, remembers rails that traced the country once, imagines trestles, rivers, arid plains, barricades of mountains – then at last, a desert where she walks for miles from nothing into nothing yet her mind expands to fill it, where every living thing grows spines. Rocks strew the ground as if they sprouted up from seed to take on form and color. No mud here, nothing putrid, only the scorched and purified, until the rains. Consider mud and the one who first took mud in her hands, made a shape and set it in the sun, who saw it dry and hold, knew she could make a cup, a bowl, vessels of earth to hold what she might offer, brushed with her breath, fired in the earthen kiln of her, soul of the maker out of emptiness.
SUSAN LEFLER’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, among them, Pinesong, Asheville Poetry Review, The Lindenwood Review, and First Things, as well as in several anthologies. She was nominated by editors for a Pushcart Prize in 2014 and 2015. Her first collection of poems, Rendering the Bones (Wind Publications, 2011), won honorable mention for the Oscar Arnold Young Award. Her poem “The Gravedigger’s Wife Ponders” won the 2013 North Carolina Poet Laureate Award. In 2016, she received her MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She lives in the mountains of western North Carolina. Her poem “Cleaning the Maple” was also a finalist in the 2016 Applewhite competition and will be published in the NCLR 2017 print issue. Read more poems by Lefler in NCLR 2015 and NCLR Online 2015.
Colonia, 2014 (ceramic, resin, steel, 61x12x8) by Cristina Córdova