28
2018
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2017 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY JANET JOYNER
Infrastructure
Mine, like the nation’s, is crumbling. This morning I forgot how to get to the Honeybaked Ham store that’s been here for decades. What’s more, once there, I couldn’t remember whether we like it with bone, or not. And getting home was just hot guessing without the GPS-ing cars now provide to guide us in reaching, as well as phoning, home – a notion that is also in flux. My first one, the one I left, had sat there for over one hundred years, a cradle redux, nest for our eggs full of those cells that convey the crux of what’s unique in our strands of tribal DNA; its beams, joists, and clapboard but a reincarnation of tree, of oak, pine, and cedar felled from the forests, the very same swamps that did see the British soldiers tremble, when Marion’s name was told; had sat there in the middle of that tiny town with the moss of its trees facing north, in Confederate tandem with that bronze Soldier planted smack dab in the middle of Main Street; with its one Post Office housing the little tarnished, copper boxes and one big, shining-brass spittoon; its one livery stable, next door to the grocer with a telephone and free delivery; its one bank with the one dentist office upstairs; and its one dry-goods emporium where Flora McIntyre,
JANET JOYNER’s prize-winning poems have been honored in Second Spring, Flying South, The Yearbook of the South Carolina Poetry Society, Bay Leaves of the North Carolina Poetry Council, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: North Carolina. Joyner was also a 2015 Applewhite finalist, and her poem “Women’s History Month” appeared in NCLR 2015. Her first collection of poems, Waterborne (Logan House, 2016), received the Holland Prize.