North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
N C L R ONLINE
FINALIST, 2014 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY BARBARA CONRAD
Coming in June Up through dark burrows, they’ll quiver, then strip off dry husks, leaving them clinging to tree bark or window screens. Uncountable brood, red-blazed eyes, throbbing their sexual song. What they’ll not do is ponder, pray liturgies, bend bloody-kneed beneath ancient creeds, I believe I believe I believe. For seventeen years they’ve hunkered in deep hush, sucking root juices, making way for a sultry stir low in their bellies. Amorous as muscled gods. Mate. Mate. Mate. Love as epitaph. And the afterlife? A muted summer porch, an unlatched screen door, sky inflamed with constellations, the earth quiet again. But truth be told, it’s hard for me to go back to a muted porch, screen door choked in honeysuckle, no matter this frenzy to rise out of a bruised ground. Too many lonely summer nights. Therapists have made fortunes over songs like theirs: I only have eyes . . . I’m nothing if not . . . I’d give up my life for you. One thing on their minds for sure, these giant bugs – a shiver, a swig of holy intoxication. And then they die. Maybe it’s best.
BARBARA CONRAD is the author of Wild Plums (FutureCycle Press, 2013) and a chapbook, The Gravity of Color (Main Street Rag, 2007). She is the editor of Waiting for Soup, a collection of art and poetry from her weekly workshops with homeless neighbors in Charlotte, NC. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tar River Poetry, Sow’s Ear, Southern Women’s Review, Icarus, Kakalak, and Southern Poetry Anthology. Listen to this poet read her other finalist poem at the 2014 North Carolina Writers Conference, and then read that poem in the print issue of NCLR 2015.
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