From the Archive: Eduardo C. Corral + Jim Johnstone (CAROUSEL 35)

Staff/ December 2, 2020/ Collaborative Poetry, Poem

EDUARDO C. CORRAL + JIM JOHNSTONE

Alternating Landscapes
(Sonoran Desert / High Park)

I roll into a high shoulder stand, all
knees and elbows —
saguaro.

Forget the beautiful
moments:

              the theatre drenched
              with rain

a fox swinging
              its cutlass

between the sun
and sun-
              glassed
              eyes

Dust devil, tattered sail.
              Stray tenderness
              stay.

My gaze is directed
by counterweights

              that mount
              like a bruise:

birch, hickory,
basewood.

To escape the rain I leap
                                   into a book.
              Terra-cotta warriors,
                            gunpowder, a buck:
                 its antlers
              the Chinese character
                            for deer.

Everything looks
       different
after light
                 strays
              from its frame

movement recast
to the sound
of cricket bows.

Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. Graywolf Press published his second book, Guillotine, in 2020. His first book, Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012) won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. His poems have appeared in Ambit, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares and Poetry. He’s the recipient of residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and Civitella Ranieri. He’s also the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship and the National Holmes Poetry Prize, both from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh. More: eduardoccorral.com
Jim Johnstone is a Toronto-based poet, editor and critic. Johnstone has authored five collections of poetry: The Chemical Life (Véhicule Press, 2017), Dog Ear (Véhicule Press, 2014), Sunday, the locusts (Tightrope Books, 2011), Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010) and The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008). He is the subject of the critical monograph Proofs & Equational Love: The Poetry of Jim Johnstone by Shane Neilson and Jason Guriel, as well as the winner of several awards including a CBC Literary Award, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and Poetry’s Editors Prize for Book Reviewing. Currently, Johnstone curates the Anstruther Books imprint at Palimpsest Press, where he published The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry (2018). More: anstrutherpress.com

Alternating Landscapes (Sonoran Desert / High Park)
appeared in CAROUSEL 35 (2015) — buy it here

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