It's just poetry, it won't bite

Coastal Dweller


02.27.12 Posted in today's words by

Finishing Line Press published Shelby Stephenson’s chapbook Playing Dead in 2011. Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl, won the Bellday Prize for Poetry in 2008 (Allen Grossman, judge) and the Oscar Arnold Young Award in 2009 from the Poetry Council of North Carolina (Jared Carter, judge). For more information on his poetry and music, visit Shelby’s website.

Coastal Dweller
By Shelby Stephenson

High weeds
smart and chinchy
sweet peas
lush
swamp
resonances of this plain

harsh winters
childhood heaves
nights quilted seven times
under
I awake sweaty faced

terror across my flesh
flashes of hog eyes
my father swallows whole
chewing the goozle
closed on a bone
he sucks for the marrow
sweet



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