58
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2018 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY JON OBERMEYER
The Ledge
COURTESY OF LEE HANSLEY GALLERY
Living in Boston is like nesting on a ledge; it’s a transient arrangement. —Seamus Heaney
Linear Construction with Color, 1953 (serigraph, 14x18) by Anne Wall Thomas
ANNE WALL THOMAS is a native of Anson County, NC, and is the first MFA graduate of that art program under the direction of Gregory D. Ivy at Woman’s College (now UNC Greensboro). She is a past Professor of Art Education at UNC Chapel Hill and the former director of the Reston Art Center in Virginia. Her work was recently featured in a two-person exhibition at Lee Hansley Gallery in Raleigh, marking her ninetieth birthday. The artist lives in Chapel Hill, NC.
Rethink it, your life. Everywhere you have lived is just a ledge, a place you could have tumbled from. Your hometown is a precipice, you’ll learn someday. What the realtor sold to you is merely a coat hook, an excuse for the roof to settle atop your head, like a butterfly; outpost for tongue-and-groove flooring to taste the sour crawl space and sweet padding of your feet. Your bills can always find another mailing address; your foundation cinderblock won’t mind at all the transient masonry and someone else’s false siding. Larger than you, Bermuda glides like a migratory transatlantic bird toward Namibia; most of California’s coast is no longer where it used to be.
JON OBERMEYER is a graduate of Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from UNC Greensboro, where he served as Associate Poetry Editor of The Greensboro Review. He lives in Bethesda, NC. A poet, short story writer, essayist, and memoirist, he has published eight books of creative work and makes his living writing grants and editing business books on themes like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and mergers and acquisitions. This is his second time as an Applewhite Prize finalist. Read his previous finalist poem in NCLR 2018.