The Zingara Project

Tag: Southern Poetry Review

  • Dusk, South Baltimore by Deborah Phelps 

    Driving home from the old city row house
    To the new suburban home,
    I always twisted about, seeking out
    My old friend, the orange Domino Sugars sign,
    Glowing, a jewel, set in the wires of shipyards.

    Admiring too, the rose-pink-gold
    Chemically-tinted clouds striating over
    The Hanover Street Bridge, as my father
    Skirts the parameters of black Cherry Hill
    Apartments and Brooklyn Park decay.

    Such poverty so grandly lit!
    Rose-pink-gold stratus and sundown.

    As if Keats himself painted an ode
    On the storefronts selling wigs and steamed
    Crabs, a sonnet for the stinking
    Old-style bars, the front doors ajar.
    A rift of ore loaded into the abandoned
    Warehouses, their brick-fronts so colorfully
    Spray painted with the names
    Of those already dead.

    —

    Deborah Phelps is a professor of Victorian literature and Women’s Studies at Sam Houston University. Originally, from Baltimore, she lives and works in Huntsville, Texas, home of the biggest penal colony and fastest death row in the nation. But that is a subject in other poems. She has published a chapbook, Deep East (selected by Stephen Dunn) and in many journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Spoon River Review, and Verse.

  • Elegy with Ice Cream by Kathy Nelson

                ―Travis Leon Hawk

    A man fits a contraption
    onto a wooden pail, fills it with ice.
    The child turns the handle as easily

    as her Jack-in-the-box but soon
    grows bored and runs to play
    in the dappled shade of July.

    This the man who, as a boy, teased
    white fluff from the knife-edges
    of cotton bolls under summer sun

    till his fingers bled. Once, he spied
    a rattler coiled between his feet.
    He wants her to understand how

    hardship built this good life, how
    readily dust could blow again, how
    quickly flak jackets could come back.

    He calls her to him, teaches―add salt
    to the ice, keep the drain clear, turn
    the crank without haste, without desire.

    Her small shoulder stiffens. He grips,
    labors with his own broad forearm,
    churns the peach-strewn cream.

    —

    Kathy Nelson (Fairview, North Carolina) is the author of two chapbooks―Cattails (Main Street Rag, 2013) and Whose Names Have Slipped Away (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Tar River Poetry, Broad River Review, and Southern Poetry Review.

  • Portrait of My Mother by Kathy Nelson

    My mother sits in profile on the photographer’s stool,
    one arm draped over crossed knees, the other behind her.
    White crinoline and ruffles. Classic pose. Scuffed shoes.

    She is taking that single breath between girl and woman.
    The ripening plum of her mouth. The start of softness
    above the narrow velvet ribbon of her empire waist.

    Nights, she listens from her bed to slamming doors,
    the late thunder of tires on oyster shells in the drive.
    Or her mother rouses her from sleep, commands her

    to yell her father’s name from the car, embarrass him―
    he and his tart carousing at the open-air bar. She’s
    a conscript in her mother’s war. What she longs for―

    her father’s love. He’s bound to his pocket flask.
    Mornings, she sits at the piano, as her mother requires,
    plays scales and études. Duty over desire. I want to break

    the glass over the portrait, let her out. I want to tell her:
    set the house on fire, let them wonder if you drowned
    in the canal, run away to Kathmandu in your scuffed shoes,

    —

    Kathy Nelson (Fairview, North Carolina) is the author of two chapbooks―Cattails (Main Street Rag, 2013) and Whose Names Have Slipped Away (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Tar River Poetry, Broad River Review, and Southern Poetry Review.