42
2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2016 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY NILLA LARSEN
You Used to Greet Trees
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Cumulous clouds buffer slowly like videos. At the park, it’s lunchbreak. Your forehead prickles from the day’s buzzing texts and fluttering tabs. You walk to the lake where a weeping willow hunches over the water. You’ve come to empty yourself of thought, but you remember walking in the forest with your parents. How you gripped branches and patted bark. Hello Thirsty. Hello Crooked. Hey You with the Red Dot. You were taught names – salutations changed: Pine fine mine . . . That’s Maple! Old, old Oak. They showed you growth rings, pointed to their own lined skin for comparison. You learned nature had bad manners too. The word ‘invasive,’ they explained, and it wormed your mind for years to come. Creeper vines who hadn’t thought to knock before the climb. Gypsy moth caterpillars who munched through leaves to a new body. You wondered why they didn’t ask before: May I please have some more?
Hidden Path, 2015 (mixed media on panel, 40x30x2) by Sondra Dorn
A Denmark native, NILLA LARSEN currently lives in Copenhagen. She earned an MFA in poetry from UNC Wilmington, and she received the 2016 poetry fellowship to attend Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her poems have been published in Nimrod, Crab Creek Review, and elsewhere.
You lie on the grass. Close your eyes. A bit of wind picks up, and the willow sweeps its streamers above the lake, never interrupting the surface. You have no questions now. Water. Dust. Air. Over and over you think this, hoping your mind will eventually quiet and the willow brush your shivering body.
SONDRA DORN is a studio artist living in Asheville, NC. She received her MFA from the University of Washington in 1996. Following graduate school, Dorn went on to a one-year artist residency at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN, and then a three-year artist residency at Penland School of Crafts in Penland, NC. She was also a CORE fellowship student at Penland between the years 1992 through 1994. Dorn shows her work in numerous juried and invitational exhibitions and has taught workshops at Penland School of Crafts and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. She is a member of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild. See more of her work on her website.