12
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 22
Stone-Bound by Mark Smith-Soto
2012 James Applewhite Poetry Prize Finalist Smaller than a hen’s egg and just as smooth, the unremarkable hue of dark grey waters, no flecks of light or runs of fossil stitching across the placid surface, nothing to explain why I kept the thing. Picking it up, enjoying its heft, I ponder what forgotten shore it might belong to, what jigsaw of heart and place I plucked it from, wanting to keep a piece. Memento of nothing now but memory’s loosening grasp, it no longer justifies its spot in the drawer of the dear and indispensable, and should follow the frayed tassel, the odd cufflink, the four eyeglass cases into the trash. But a river stone doesn’t find a spot among coffee grounds and orange peels, and even out in the backyard, everything cries against it, not ours, not ours! What shall I do with you? I ask it, nestled in the hollow of my hand.
Mark Smith-Soto received the second James Applewhite Poetry Prize for “Last Retreat to Topsail Island,” which will be published in NCLR’s 2013 print issue. In the meantime, you can watch the award presentation and hear Mark read his winning poem at the 2012 Eastern North Carolina Literary Homecoming. This poet is a professor of Spanish and editor of International Poetry Review at UNC–Greensboro. His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Nimrod, The Sun, and numerous other literary journals, including NCLR 2001 and 2012. Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing in 2005, he has published three prize-winning chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections, Our Lives Are Rivers (University Press of Florida, 2003) and Any Second Now (Main Street Rag, 2006). He has also published a translation of the selected poetry of Costa Rican writer Ana Istarú, Fever Season (Unicorn Press, 2010). And his most recent collection of poems is Berkeley Prelude: A Lyrical Memoir (Unicorn Press, 2012).