Carrie
Jerrell
winner
of the fourth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, 2008
Two
poems from Carrie Jerrell's prize-winning collection, After the Revival
followed
by a note on the author
Nocturne
for
Matthew
Twenty-two,
come from the underground,
you're through with the mine's night shift and
wear coal dust
like vernix while playing Clair de Lune. Moths crowd
the
porch-lit screen door, and you've come to trust
your
ear for every chord. Dark note by note,
how many hours you've searched for
songs that burn
like lustrous rock – your damp neck creased with soot,
your
hands unclean – only to be spurned
by
stars repeating, Time, Time, Time.
My only brother, in the pitch of
sleep, may hymns
resolve for you. May your dreams be more than ash.
May
you climb to a house of light and blind
yourself at its windows, breathe its
music in,
and beat your wings like prayers against the mesh.
The
Country-Western Singer's Ex-Wife, Sober in Mendocino County, California
Somewhere
back East my late love's all coked up,
another cowgirl wannabe lying
at
his feet while he plucks a Willie Nelson song
from his beer-soaked six string
and complains nobody
understands a rebel's broken heart.
I've played her
part, the star struck blonde in boots
and
denim mini, pert boobs, and brains to boot.
Whiskey fed, dreamy, how I talked
him up,
a sequined Tammy to his George, my heart
a backstage bed I wanted
him to lie in.
It proved too hard, and when a harder body
came along, he
said, The party's over,
and
left me listening to "Sad Songs and Waltzes,"
Waylon, steel guitars
that struck like a boot
to the face. But that's good country, right? A body
enamored
with its bruises, praising its screw-ups,
the blood still wet in its wounds?
Memory lies
as still as a rattlesnake until my heart
comes
begging for its venom. Sink 'em in, my heart
says. I've been traveling
on a horse called Music,
and he's brought me here to die. I'd be lying
if
I said I didn't want to fill my ex's boots
with spit the night I caught him
with that up-
start starlet at the bar; when everybody
tried
to hide in their shot glasses; when nobody
but a Broadway street preacher had
the heart
to hold my hair off my face while I threw up
outside; when all
the songs I loved – "Crazy,"
"Golden Ring," "Jolene"
– became like boots
too busted to put on, bent-pitch ballads of his lies,
my
shame sung loud in the key of C. He's lying
from the stage, in the bar or bed,
when he says nobody
understands him. I do. I've burned my boots,
moved west
to wine and water because his heart
was a dry bottle, cold as the black rose
rotting
in his lapel, and I still wake up
to
his tunes: the beer, blow, boots and love, the lies
they tell and don't. Once,
I was a good-hearted woman.
Now I pray, Lord, please, somebody, shut him up.
©
Carrie
Jerrell was born in Petersburg, Indiana in 1976. She received her M.A. from the
Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University in 2004 and is currently completing
her Ph.D. in English as a Chancellor's Fellow at Texas Tech University. Her work
has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Subtropics, Image,
Passages North, and Fringe, as well the anthologies Sonnets:
150 Contemporary Sonnets, Cadence of Hooves, and Best New Poets
2005. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she also serves as the poetry editor
for Iron Horse Literary Review.
