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
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Dust devil, tattered sail. Stray tenderness stay.
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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
