Alice Pettway is a former Lily Peter fellow, Raymond L. Barnes Poetry Award winner, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, The Time of Hunger | O Tempo de Chuva, is available now from Salmon Poetry. A second book, Moth, is forthcoming in 2019. Currently, she lives and writes in Shanghai.
Another Missed Reunion
I am daisies
on the kitchen table
a held place
still the girl
who pinched a finger
in the farmhouse door.
Next year I will skip
the florist, the note
in unfamiliar handwriting
disappear
juice dripped
from a sun-warmed tomato.
~
No One Watches Narcos
in Colombia
Ask about the clouds
condensed on green-grey leaves
of the páramo, or the panela steam
rising sweetly out of cyclists’ mugs,
the boys throwing boxes, boat to arm
to store, along the coast where cars
still have no roads to follow. Ask
about Botero, about the lanolin
coating the hands of women
spinning yarn out of sheep,
the cable cars strung like Christmas
lights up mountains. The world
does not want this plot, they want
tragedy, a show they’ve seen so often
they can watch with the sound off.
~
Stillness
I have hunted it down
clay-slick paths slipping
into the sea, bare soles
twisting among roots and rain,
followed it in the snow
when the mountains
shiver white—fleeing
the small bird called dread
who flies from me
and pursues me, his call
always in two places, untraceable
notes singing disaster
as surely as stone cuts skin.