214
2020
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2019 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY JOHN FRANK HAUGH
Baba Yaga After a Bad Tinder Date In raven robes, she stands in a wide wild field as twilight hints of sister-black on the far horizon. She gyres hands, chants polyglot commands, stalking toward his home, as winds grow for her, pull bramble-roots that weave with grasses. She throws both hands out like parallel knives. Living ropes fly straight, clunk into his mobile home’s baby blue vinyl siding, coil like restless serpents in great spirals. He is yanked out by ropes the color of November, wearing a torn Ed Sheeran tee shirt, root-fingers bind him to his front porch, dig deep into his house’s thin walls.
JOHN FRANK HAUGH’s poetry has been published in Notre Dame Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, Old Mountain Press, Camel City Dispatch, and elsewhere. He won the Nancy J. Heggem Poetry Award, Winston-Salem’s Poetry in Plain Sight, and Greensboro’s Visual Poetry Walk. He is working on a book tentatively titled “Conversations about mixtapes, red clay and repurposed ghosts.”