Issue 57

For this issue we present poetry by Linda Annas Ferguson. These three poems appear in her book Dirt Sandwich which was published by Press53.

BIO:  Linda Annas Ferguson is the author of five collections of poetry, including Bird Missing from One Shoulder(WordTech Editions, 2007)Stepping on Cracks in the Sidewalk(Finishing Line Press, 2006); Last Chance to Be Lost(Kentucky Writers’ Coalition, 2004); It’s Hard to Hate a Broken Thing(Palanquin Press, University of S.C. Aiken, 2002). She was the 2005 Poetry Fellow for the South Carolina Arts Commission and served as the 2003-04 Poet-in-Residence for the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C. A recipient of the Poetry Fellowship of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, she is a member of the Academy’s Board of Governors. She was a featured poet for the Library of Congress Poetry at Noon Series. Her work is archived by Furman University Special Collections in the James B. Duke Library. A North Carolina native, she now resides in Charleston, SC.  Visit her website at www.lindaannasferguson.com

RAINBOWS ARE REAL

I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and earth . . . Genesis 9.13

If you walk toward one, it will move away,
existence relative to the rain, the angle
of light traveling, slowing as it goes
through water, scattering into color,
then bending back to our eyes.

Once I saw a a rainbow while flying,
looking down from the sky, not an arc,
but a complete circle, the plane’s silhouette
in the cneter. Pilots call it a “glory.”

I wonder if this was the way one first appeared
to God, His magnified shadow hovering
over muddy land and multitudes of dead bodies
like the last dark cloud as it drained itself,

a halo, whole and unbroken, cast whent eh sun
was low, a symbol for the end of devastation
and downpours of paternal lessons, yet
bewildering enough to be a bringer of blessings.

WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND

. . . much study is a weariness of the flesh.  Ecclesiastes 12:12

It’s humbling to the human,
to have an examined life
turned over so many times
it feels leathery.

I walk the beach remembering
the smooth bohemian I meant to be.
An old man calls to me
from the concrete slab of a condo.

He’s offering me something,
plums rotting in a bowl, juice
seping from their wrinkled skin.

Waves scratch their scars
into the shore. Varicose purple
streaks the sky. I leave a shell

for a young woman asleep
in a hammock, an oyster
still silky and iridescent
by her open hand.

THE RAPTURE

 

My son wants to know if a wormhole
is how Elijah was taken into the sky,
as he watches snow whiten the lawn
like Heaven coming to us; why snow

doesn’t last forever and what
forever is anyway, wanting four sides
or an axis, something sensible
as science to his twelve-year-old mind.

His grandmother replies, says we will
be taken like Elijah in the rapture.
He equates it to alien abduction,
to the disappearance of Jack

up the beanstalk or Alice into the mirror,
remembering other worlds he has visited
in his imagination, picturing God
at the computer, His finger on delete.

He tells her his teacher says we are
seventy-two percent water, as he exhales
on the window pane, writes his name,
explains the existence of moisture

that forms, then evaporates, the snow
beginning to leave, little by little,
as breaths of steam ride a stream
of sunlight into opening clouds.