Take It Home

I’m watching a girl who looks like my sister write lines of poetry in a Moleskine notebook during the presentation on Frank Stanford, the “Swamprat Rimbaud.” This is exactly what I imagine my sister would be doing. She doesn’t dig poems about outhouses and knives. My sister would turn from all this and write a love poem. She wouldn’t see “The Snake Doctors” as a love poem, even though they ride each other again and again in the dark. What do I know? Maybe it isn’t a love poem. The girl who looks like my sister raises her left hand to ruffle (v.) her whimsical pixie cut. Ruffles (n.) on her sleeve flap in the air conditioner, and the auditorium fills with fiddleheads and frog song. The watercolor bluebirds on her blouse soar and land on the backs of plush theater seats. Her right hand stops. She looks up. My right hand stops and I look up. The presenter talks about the consistency of blood.

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Shannon Finck is a lecturer of English at Georgia State University, where she earned her Ph.D. in 20th-century and contemporary literature and theory in 2014. She also holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and narrative poetry from Georgia College. Her creative work appears in FUGUE, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, Willawaw, and elsewhere. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for the independent literary quarterly, Birdcoat, and is Co-Founder of Ghost Peach Press.