Pris Campbell
Pris Campbell
Trembling
Rebirth
It’s an Alfred Hitchcock sort of night. Birds lurk treacherously on tree limbs. Clouds bandage a bruised sky. The crazy man next door yells at ghosts dressed in lavender and pink. I could swear the clock said 2 a.m. hours ago, but what do I know? My pillow is a rock. I can’t catch my breath.
The top of my head slid open and grandfather shot out, muttering threats, grasping hands barely missing my breasts. A stranger stared, wide-eyed, back from the mirror. Visions of dark water rushed me and I was swallowed by Jonah’s whale. It was the evening of my first drink; my rite of passage into dubious adulthood.
I pretend I’m running barefoot through the woods. Wind lifts my hair and you grab me. We roll in the fallen leaves.
Mary Hillier, Trembling
I had no idea I would lose you, lose nearly everyone I’ve loved in this lifetime, would be captured by illness, watch my body become mother’s.
Among other poetry journals and anthologies, Pris Campbell’s poetry has appeared in Chiron Review, Mainstreet Rag, OCHO, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, and The Dead Mule Journal of Southern Literature. Recently, she was featured poet in From East to West, In the Fray, and Empowerment4Women.
I turn my mind to the south, set the clock back, race headlong into my future all over again, the sky still trembling with possibilities
You led me onto that Manhattan fire escape where smog pockmarked the stars, held me. You didn’t say it would be okay, offer platitudes, didn’t reach into the whale’s belly to save me from memories flooding my body. I had to work my own way out, leave the Four Horsemen behind, smash tablets scrawled with survival lies. Who did I used to be? I later asked old friends. Tell me who I was.
Her third book, Hesitant Commitments, part of the Little Red Book series is available from Lummox Press (www.lummoxpress.com), as is her recently released full length book, Sea Trails. She was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize in 2009 and once in 2008. A former Clinical Psychologist, she was sidelined by CFIDS (also known as ME/CFS) in 1990. She currently lives in the greater West Palm Beach, Florida, with her husband.
Mary Hillier, Rebirth
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