by Charles Wright
Southern Cultures, Vol. 7, No.3: Fall 2001

I came to my senses with a pencil in my hand
And a piece of paper in front of me.
To the years
Before the pencil, O, I was the resurrection.
Still, who knows where the soul goes,
Up or down,
after the light switch is turned off, who knows?
It’s late August, and prophets are calling their bears in.
The sacred is frightening to the astral body,
As is its absence.
We have to choose which fear is our consolation.
Everything comes ex alto,
We’d like to believe, the origin and the end, or
Non-origin and the non-end,
each distant and inaccessible.
Over the Blue Ridge, the whisperer starts to whisper in tongues.
Remembered landscapes are left in me
The way a bee leaves its sting,
hopelessly, passion-placed,
Untranslatable language.
Non-mystical, insoluble in blood, they act as an opposite
To the absolute, whose words are a solitude, and set to music.
All forms of landscape are autobiographical.

Charles Wright, one of the leading lights of contemporary American poetry, received the Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 collection of poems, Black Zodiac. The author of twelve volumes of poetry, he currently teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

by Tammy L. Brown
Southern Cultures, Vol. 18, No. 3: Fall 2012

what’s my name?   “L”  sometimes lula   sometimes belle
some times lulabelle   i scratch L’s   on   sandstone   bark
black bottom of syrup boiled vats   in lost love   holiness
l o n e some
i crack twig-rich puddles like sunburnt bones
tread mud-covered leaves   skip pebbles over icy silver   i build
L’s out of licorice root and lilac
i steal lace to look like a lady
sometimes i’m holy
sometimes i’m wholey sinning
i call on the lord    i laugh through lashings    i be the lord    i
like to sing:
Nobody Knows
i butterfly    i honeysuckle    i eel— scaleless
slither in liquid lightning    i cane liquor— memory still licked from
the rim   i am   i am the “L” carved on my left calf by my Ma to recall me.

Tammy L. Brown is Assistant Professor of Black World Studies and History at Miami University of Ohio. Her book City of Islands: Caribbean Intellectuals in New York (The University Press of Mississippi, 2015) uses the life stories of Caribbean intellectuals as “windows” into the dynamic history of immigration to New York and the long battle for racial equality in modern America.

Abigail Lee is a poet and a PhD student in English at UNC–Chapel Hill. Her work has been published by Mid-American Review, Bayou Magazine, CALYX, and others.