the national poetry month issue || radish
TRANSCRIPT
University of Northern Iowa
RadishAuthor(s): Robert PeakeSource: The North American Review, Vol. 292, No. 2, The National Poetry Month Issue (Mar. -Apr., 2007), p. 13Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25478863 .
Accessed: 12/06/2014 21:18
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NAR
SEAN NEVIN
The Carpenter Bee
Black and polished with light, it treads the air beneath the arched soffits of our house, where
this morning I smeared, with a clean metal blade, a dollop of putty over the bullet-sized hole it bore into the eave.
I watched, for an hour that bee, tap-tap-tapping like the severed tip of a cane groping after what was lost, and
like that, I saw again the frostbitten toe the medics let thaw, then amputated as I slept through a gauze
of morphine. The charred and inconsolable knuckle
that would, for years, try, each night in my dreams, to come home from the war.
ROBERT PEAKE
Radish
She has let herself go: the stringy gray-green mop, stubble sprouting from her curlicue tail,
soil stains on a faded red leotard
bulging with crisp, white flesh.
Smoldering root, once
she drew fire from the soil,
hope, sulphur, and sex.
Plucked into air, now
she trembles in hand, a scalded heart still pulsing.
FINALISTS JAMES HEARST POETRY PRIZE
March-April 2007 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW 13
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