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Lois Marie Harrod won a 2003 fellowship, her third, from the New
Jersey Council on the Arts for her poetry. Her seventh book Put
Your
Sorry Side Out was just published by Concrete Wolf. Her sixth
book of
poetry Spelling the World Backward (200) was published by
Palanquin
Press, University of South Carolina Aiken, which also published
her
chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999) and her book
Part of
the Deeper Sea (l997). Her poems have appeared in journals
from A-Z,
among them American Poetry Review, Blueline, Bombay Gin,
The
Connecticut Review Faultline, The Carolina Quarterly, Prairie
Schooner, Zone 3. Her earlier publications include the books
Every
Twinge a Verdict (Belle Mead Press, l987), Crazy Alice (Belle
Mead
Press, l991) and a chapbook Green Snake Riding (New Spirit
Press,
l994).
Garrote
The rainy maple
suspends its drops, small glass bells
along a dark branch.
Why do they seem
more a choker than a bracelet?
Slug
I should drown
you in my beer
with my other miseries,
you fat leaf of grief,
you gut of slime.
But you slick your way in,
the wet skulk of you,
when I pick beans,
when I pick tomatoes.
You are the one who finds
the biggest strawberry
and the thickest squash
and takes your chunk.
Oh I know the tyrant
who tore out the tongues
that became you.
Was he not my father?
I want to crush you
beneath my heel.
But here you are again
this morning,
the silvery peel
meandering across
the rough porch plank.
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