Skip to main content

Steven Croft

Alapaha

When I take HWY 280 across South Georgia
to Birmingham, choosing its sometimes
lonely asphalt splitting forests of pine or farms
flush with crops over the monotony of interstate
and Atlanta's spaghetti interchanges, I make time
to leave this slower road, buttoned by small towns
of Main Streets, motels, and Dairy Queens, turn
further south, find the even slower roads
in the county of my grandfather's one room
schoolhouse where he sat for eleven years
and daydreamed of the river and pine woods
of quiet deer and turkey calls, sometimes a bear,
find the place he liked to go,behind the country
church on the, even now, dirt road, down the river
bluff in the rural place he was born into.

I park at the church where he pulled his pistol
on two angry roaming dogs, fired it into a tree,
only wanting to scare them he explained, would
only kill them if he had to: this lesson in spirits –
trees, animals, people, ancestors -- best taught,
felt, believed, here where hives of mosquitoes
float through twilight, where I walk the broken
clay road down to the river, where I wait for night
to shimmer moonlight on forever tea-dark waters,
mysterious waters, hedged by bald cypresses, wait
for whippoorwill's song, and my grandfather's
memory spirit-walks across where we would put
the boat in with its quiet electric motor, his memory
resting here in the waking night, heavy in my chest.


Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Canary, The New Verse News, The Dead Mule, Live Nude Poems, Quaci Press Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ariel Chart, and other places, and have been nominated or the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

David Oliver Cranmer

Not Just Another Playlist Often, I sit in my swivel chair looking out the window, while jazz, country, or rock music plays. This pleasure goes on for many hours a mystic trance of sorts streaming—the glue maintaining my soul. I turn the best songs into playlists (once we called them mix tapes) puzzling over the perfect order. Does Satchmo’s “What a Wonderful World” kick off my latest list or make it the big soulful closer? And does “Mack the Knife” go higher in the set than “Summertime?” That’s an Ella Fitzgerald duet! “Foolishness? No, it’s not” whether you are climbing a tree to count all the leaves or tapping to beats. These are the joys that bring inner peace and balance (to a cold universe) lifting spirits skyward. David Oliver Cranmer ’s poems, short stories, articles, and essays have appeared in publications such as Punk Noir Magazine , The Five-Two: Crime Poetry Weekly , Needle: A Magazine of Noir , LitReactor , Macmillan’s Criminal Element , and