This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Gold Hill Family Audio by Corrie Lynn White, released by Southeast Missouri State University Press in 2022.
In Praise of Multitudes
I am looking through the key-hole. You are pacing past my only light. When I say you are, you is more than one. The English language knows I am looking at a river, a string of rail cars, a field of what’s wild. When I say hold on, the road will turn to gravel; your muscles won’t soften. When I say the bottle’s open; go pour a glass, you slide the bottoms of your feet into the kitchen. My dusty floor might stick to your feet when I say let’s dance. When I say hush, the crickets thicken. Home isn’t where you leave it. When I say you are, God knows one isn’t enough: that hope gleans heaven here and over there – a girl gone to gather.
Corrie Lynn White is the author of Gold Hill Family Audio (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2022). A 2021 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow in Poetry, she is the recipient of the 2013 Amon Liner Poetry Award from the Greensboro Review. Originally from Gold Hill, North Carolina, White currently lives in Chattanooga.
Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.
