This month we are featuring the poets and writers who have signed with us in the past six months—all writers who submitted work during one of our two annual open reading periods.
Today we bring you Ruth Williams, whose poetry collection Flatlands will be published in April of 2018.
 

The Author

Excerpt

Radial Plain
As she lay with her eyes closed, she had again, more vividly than for many years, the old illusion of her girlhood, of being lifted and carried lightly by someone very strong […] She knew at last for whom it was she had waited, and where he would carry her.
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
In my 13th year, hanging
the laundry, the white sheets
were like blowsy dresses
and my heartache
was a new
nostalgia, the plains
the leavening,
grasses a long cry,
the hair of my later years
growing before me.
How I spent that summer
like Cather, wanting
the strong arms
of another coming
round me, knowing
that this too was a foretaste
of what it meant to be flattened,
to love like the dirt,
hard, packed,
how fertile then
not to know what
I would become.
Originally Published in Zone 3, Volume 31, No. 2, Fall 2016.
 
Jackalope
The prairie
demands décollage.
In strips,
tear the grass away
to a light hare. The horns,
a shadow branch
that oscillates
in a mythic drowse.
The hair
around each bone
moves lightly
as if bewitching.
Touch it,
and now you’re outlined,
torn into
shape. Oh, yes—
you’re being
found.
 
Dumbfounded
No need for driving rain
to wash you. I prefer messes,
I consoled myself.
There wasn’t anything
true about that.
I only wanted to write
like a shirt turned inside out, tags
gone cryptic upside down.
To create a vague sense
of discomfort.
A rock in the shoe, a piece of floss
stuck between teeth.
Like driving around
the city of your birth
but out where
all the new shops went in.
A set of cul-de-sacs
to destroy you.
Like a tonic,
a talisman, you repeat:
keep your palm
on the left-hand side.
No matter the maze, that’s how
you’ll find your way out.