North Carolina Literature in a Global Context
N C L R ONLINE
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FINALIST, 2014 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY GRACE C. OCASIO
After Perusing Grandma’s Scrapbook Why didn’t you leave me your yellowest dress? Your blackest comb? Your knottiest wool scarf? These musty Christmas cards are all that’s left of you. I want you to sit at my dinner table, lean over and whisper my name. Please speak in prayer. Please rustle these drapes in my living room. Did you curl up in wicker settees in sunrooms or settle into armchairs in parlors? If you could return to flesh and bones, where would you go? Tell me the names of Raleigh streets you wandered in 1934. Show me how to roller-skate on dirt roads. I can’t decipher these bits of handwriting that stop and restart. How do I resurrect you? What I know is your hair bloomed glossy black. I want to grasp like dandelions those waves in your hair, sow them in my apron pockets.
Chavis Park Merry Go Round (mixed media collage on canvas board, 24x18) by J. Stacy Utley
I wish you would take my hands. Tell me if my hands are skimming oceans or orchids. Show me how to play my hands like an overture to a ballet.
J. STACY UTLEY was born in Mildenhall, Suffolk, United Kingdom. He earned his undergraduate degrees in architecture (2001) and environmental design (2006) at NC State University and began his career as an architect soon after. In 2014, he received his MFA in Visual Arts at Lesley University College of Art and Design in Boston. He is a frequent lecturer in such venues as the Harvey B. Gantt Center for Cultural Art in Charlotte, NC. His art has been exhibited widely throughout North Carolina, including at the Witherspoon African American Cultural Center at NC State University and the Block Gallery in Raleigh and the Hodges Taylor Gallery in Charlotte, and his work is in numerous private and permanent collections such as Johnson C. Smith University and NC State University. He currently lives and works in Charlotte, where he maintains his studio. See more of his work on his website.
Twice a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry (in 2010 and 2013), GRACE C. OCASIO is a recipient of the 2014 North Carolina Arts Council–funded Regional Artist Project Grant. She won honorable mention in the 2012 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition for her poem “Little Girlfriend” (published in NCLR 2013) and the 2011 Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka Poetry Prize. She was a scholarship recipient to the 2011 Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and she has been selected for inclusion in the North Carolina volume (VII) of The Southern Poetry Anthology. Her first full-length collection, The Speed of Our Lives, was published by BlazeVOX Books in 2014. Read another of her Applewhite competition finalist poems in NCLR 2015, and listen to a reading of this poem at the 2014 North Carolina Writers Conference.