Cursive

FINAL JUDGE, 2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE

BY CATHERINE CARTER

A witch-general of the resistance, one of three recruited from the mill’s weaving-room after blueshirts broke the last union, writes a dispatch in glyphs only a witch can read, and even among witches, only an old witch: the Palmer runes she learned a thousand years ago when there were schools and she kicking third-grade patent maryjanes on chrome rungs, her bright black cornrows sparkling scarlet and turquoise with beads. All along the way, at relaypoints for dromedary, caravan, carrier pigeon, boy soldiers who have seen all the vids and plan to die with a defiant smile, the young seek to read the script, but no, only the one waiting can decode it, before dropping back on her cot to die. The young call it cursive; they believe it carries a curse, and maybe it does.

CATHERINE CARTER is Professor of English at Western Carolina University. Her poetry collections include three from Louisiana State University Press: The Memory of Gills (2006; reviewed in NCLR 2007 and recipient of the Roanoke-Chowan Award), The Swamp Monster at Home (2012; reviewed in NCLR Online 2013), and Larvae of the Newest Stars (2019; reviewed in NCLR Online 2021). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Orion, Best American Poetry 2009, Ecotone, and Tar River Poetry. She was the recipient of the 2009 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. Her poem “Womb-Room” won the 2018 James Applewhite Poetry Prize and is featured in NCLR 2019. She was the final judge for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize in 2021. See more of her poems in the 2022 print issue.

Only this story isn’t true, because secret writing is only a sideline: back in that longago class, the witches learned to weigh things with scales. Those boys who think they’ll die bravely silent, vital words knitted safe into scarves or knotted into bootlaces, who in the end will beg and weep and piss themselves: they have borne those boys, nursed them. And the glass slivers under the nails, the witch-waking, the water never brought: they have borne those too. No one would recruit these women to turn kids over to war, not when in the pans of their hands they have borne those lives’ weight. Their measure. Their worth. Those witches are still back in the clack and roar of the plant, breathing lint, winding bobbins, snipping threads. They have been all along. Their secret curses will never be heard.

Spontaneous Resistance No. 6, 2018 (mixed media on paper, 30x22) by Liz Miller

LIZ MILLER received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the University of Minnesota. Her installations and works on paper have been featured in solo and group exhibitions regionally, nationally, and internationally. Her awards include a 2018 McColl Center for Art + Innovation Artist Residency in partnership with UNC Charlotte and supported by the Wingate Foundation; a 2013 McKnight Professional Development Grant from Forecast Public Art; a 2011–12 McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists; a 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant; a 2007–08 MCAD/Jerome Foundation Fellowship; and multiple Artist Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Miller lives and works in Good Thunder, MN. She is Professor of Installation and Drawing at Minnesota State University-Mankato.