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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2024
2023 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST BY JANET FORD
Eagles A cardboard arrow pointed down the stairs to the basement where Eagles Five and Dime made room for Christmas every year. I have ten minutes. Mama checked her watch. Then they’ll want me back in Children’s Wear. I followed Mama past the gun and holster sets in boxes wrapped with cellophane, past bicycles with shiny wire baskets and handlebar streamers like pastel manes, and a line of runner sleds propped against the wall. She stopped at a row of plastic dolls, the kind that blink when you shake them back and forth. They fixed me with the shallow stares of a string of mackerel on a pier. I thought you might find something here.
JANET FORD lives in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains in western North Carolina. A Laureate Finalist in the Pinesong Awards of 2020 and 2021, she was the recipient of the 2017 Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review, and her poems have also appeared in Poetry East, Caesura, and NCLR Online 2021 and 2023. Watch her performance poetry, selected by Glenis Redmond for special note in the premiere Jaki Shelton Green Performance Poetry Prize. In February 2022, she was featured in Poetry in Plain Sight, and she received the 2022 Susan Laughter Meyers Residency Fellowship Award.