62
2021
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
FINALIST, 2020 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY SHARI CRANE FOX
Hypnopompic hallucination of you and your ex in a horse pasture f ive miles outside of Greensboro You’re with him again, waiting for your scrap of connubial bliss like a dog beneath the table, your mind having plopped you into a pastoral scene this time, tension dimpling like the dry field grasses scratching at your ankles. And because it’s a dream, he’s lost his paunch and his indecision, a typey bull of a man, stacked like a bulldog on a sidewalk. You tell yourself there must have been a time when it all meant something, when the distance didn’t warm you like coffee in your favorite cup. You tell yourself that there are cracked cup people, and there are new cup people, and honestly, this isn’t your first cracked cup. Divorce is such a delicate thing. Still, the gardeners work the yard because someone needs to please the neighbors.
SHARI CRANE FOX comes from Cherokee, Lakota, Blackfoot and Irish roots. She holds advanced degrees from the University of Arizona, UC San Diego, the Mayo Clinic, and Stanford. In 2019, she won the Carl Sennhenn Poetry Prize. She received first prize in the 2019 Oregon Poetry Association contest and was a semifinalist for the 2019 James Applewhite Poetry Prize. In 2018, she received an honorable mention in the OPA contest, and in 2016, two poems were finalists in the Patricia Dobler Contest. In 2016 she was also selected for Apogee Journal’s #NoDAPL issue. She lived in Greensboro, NC, during a research fellowship at Wake Forest University. She now lives in Portland, OR.