Alice Pettway is a former Lily Peter fellow, Raymond L. Barnes Poetry Award winner, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, The Time of Hunger | O Tempo de Chuva, is available now from Salmon Poetry. A second book, Moth, is forthcoming in 2019. Currently, she lives and writes in Shanghai.

 

Another Missed Reunion

 

I am daisies

on the kitchen table

 

a held place

 

still the girl

who pinched a finger

in the farmhouse door.

 

Next year I will skip

the florist, the note

in unfamiliar handwriting

 

disappear

 

juice dripped

from a sun-warmed tomato.

 

~

 

No One Watches Narcos

in Colombia

 

 

Ask about the clouds

condensed on green-grey leaves

of the páramo, or the panela steam

rising sweetly out of cyclists’ mugs,

the boys throwing boxes, boat to arm

to store, along the coast where cars

still have no roads to follow. Ask

about Botero, about the lanolin

coating the hands of women

spinning yarn out of sheep,

the cable cars strung like Christmas

lights up mountains. The world

does not want this plot, they want

tragedy, a show they’ve seen so often

they can watch with the sound off.

 

~

 

Stillness

 

I have hunted it down

clay-slick paths slipping

into the sea, bare soles

twisting among roots and rain,

 

followed it in the snow

when the mountains

shiver white—fleeing

the small bird called dread

who flies from me

and pursues me, his call

always in two places, untraceable

 

notes singing disaster

as surely as stone cuts skin.