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.
Morning as Philosophy
This skinny hour— floor-boards damp with rain pressed down like piano keys. I follow them to the sink, empty but for butter-knives. Bread gone but the heel. How I’ve let things dwindle, let open door-ways whisper about the better future. God could change my heart if I let him hunker down among the soft grip of summer and point at that July path I took to the water dragging kayak. Water lapped the bank and it was clear: stay here. Sun knew no better than shoulder, petal, leaf. Turtles risked their balance for a branch. They did it in pairs. But on the lake’s edge, I pushed off and dipped the oar, decided to be—majorette, toy working by battery towards coves— shaded, sewn-in, minnows following after.
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.
