Featured Poet: Lesle Lewis, Alstead
Lesle Lewis is the author of Small Boat, which won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize and Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006). Her poems have appeared in many journals including the following: Pleiades, American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Old Crow, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street, Mudfish, Slope, LIT, Sentence, and Pool. She teaches literature and writing at Landmark College in Vermont and lives in New Hampshire.
Of her featured poem, Lesle writes:
The poem “Continent Behind the College” (recently published in Jubilat) was composed through a combining of journal notes over a period of several weeks and in particular notes taken while sitting in “retreat” on the patio behind the café at Landmark College where I teach. Some pieces of the poem come from the notion of any one spot in space and time having within it the wealth of a whole continent. In general, I'd say that a successful poem will surprise me and end up somewhere I never could have expected, in this case, a clock shop.
The Continent Behind the College
A Soiree at the Sanitarium
A mother is killed on the highway, her fawn hovering over her body. By philosophy's time we're counted broke.
My cat is a rolling prime number on hot brick. The bricks wobble, convalesce, and hallucinate. The sanitarium has theme and piano, a tour about, and special beverage experiments.
We pray for the gift of longer life sentences. On the continent behind the college, many boys and girls lie resting.
The Dark Eye
We're good ninety percent of the time. We look work right in its dark eye.
The continent behind the college is spreading. It's not nonsense; it's Friday. An artist unhangs his show.
How the cracks between rocks and bricks fill with thyme, text and pots with sun, a television mutters, a mood shutters.
When you sit opposite from me at the café, I see what's behind you and you see what's behind me. Perhaps we should have been planning for this spontaneous conversation.
The New England Thinkers
Don't rush my sitting under the finch book tree. It has been dark for ten days and like two eyes feed one brain, we go driving. We are on an expedition to see the big numbers and wreckage of the floods.
We are in a clock shop.
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