Friday, March 14, 2014

Poem of the Week: Eduardo C. Corral


Eduardo Corral    
All the Trees of the Field Shall Clap Their Hands
 

Josefa Segovia was tried, convicted & hanged on July 5, 1851, in Downieville, California, for killing an Anglo miner, a man who the day before had assaulted her.


Are the knees & elbows  

     the first knots   
  
                     the dead untie?
  
       I swing from a rope
  
                     lashed
  
       to a beam. Some men
  
along the Yuba river
  
               toss coins
  
         into the doubling water.
  
                   Visible skin.
  
            Memorable hair.
  
     Imagine: coal, plow,
  
                     rust, century.
  
                 All layers
  
         of the same palabra.
  
                                       Once
  
I mistook a peach pit
  
               on a white dish
  
         for a thumbprint.
  
   Wolf counselor.
  
                       Reaper.
  
             Small rock.
  
   The knot just under
  
       my right ear
  
whispers God is gracious,
  
             God will

increase. The soul,
  
                   like semen,

       escapes
  
the body
  
         swiftly.


-Eduardo C. Corral  

Use by permission.
From Slow Lightning (Yale University Press, 2012)
Photo by: JW Stovall 

Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Quarterly West. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry, and writing residencies to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he currently lives in New York City.

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