North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
N C L R ONLINE
FINALIST, 2014 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY MARYLIN HERVIEUX
Deadweight Sun polishes the road at the bend where the oak, scarred and wart-barked, stands like an old stunt man. It’s fall, but grass still claims the trials of summer, valor in its length, a length that nearly hides her – the deer whose legs, narrow as a child’s wrists, gave when she fell. She’s not yet stiff but ants, with brooding occupation, file toward her mouth – a tavern of blood. How sleek she was in her wellborn coat, the underside of her tail, snap-white; her thinbone fineness having coaxed the forest into submission. She’s a version of sadness on this phantom trestle where life passes to somewhere else. She nearly made it to the roadside woods where falling leaves litigate for position, and a squat branch cracks of its own redundancy; where three does and a fawn stood for the longest time, like figurines with large, dark eyes painted to stare here, where she lies. They had to stop, it seems, before stepping again into their maundering, an ungloved chill sworn to their shadows.
MARYLIN HERVIEUX is originally from Upstate New York but has lived in North Carolina for many years, currently in rural Orange County, south of Hillsborough. A recipient of an Artist Project Grant from the Orange County Arts Council, she taught poetry workshops to various special needs groups in the community. Her work has been published in Kakalak, Kalliope, Tar River Poetry, and the North Carolina Art’s Council’s Poet-of-the-Week Series. Listen to the poet read “Going Again,” which received honorable mention in the 2014 Applewhite competition, and then read that poem in the print issue of NCLR 2015.
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