More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Del Sol Press First Annual Poetry Award Winner: Austin Hummell, for Poppy
Austin Hummell's first full-length collection of poems, The Fugitive Kind, won the Contemporary Poetry Series and was published by the University of Georgia Press. He has new work in Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Rattle, Fugue, and some anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation. He is associate professor at Northern Michigan University and is poetry editor of Passages North.
Poppy will be available from Del Sol Press in Fall, 2004.
Helen's Cordial
She came in vinaigrette from the bedroom
with a syringe raised like a distaff of gold
flax, like she was the mother of exiles
explaining the cloudless harbor of New York.
Came because she had seen them freeze before
when they tied dope to a drunk. Seen the sleep
in the dying face, the rigor in the arms and neck,
the mouth like the stem of a breathless raft.
She knew the bluing lips and blanching face,
the body ferried too far, the eyes like coins.
She knew it was hers, the stuff still uncut
by baby laxative and speed, that took him.
So we walked him like a chair to his car—
our arms crossed beneath him in a throne
we summoned from childhood and weddings--
and left him for the sirens to swallow.
She said sometimes flowers are more than flowers
and Greek the language of gentlest sleep.
She came from the bedroom like Helen came
in Sparta, both motive and heroine,
to drown an old war in her husband, free
the gall of his friends. Came to us smiling
with a needle she said we'd share. Told us
how he scarred his arms and roped his hair
and wore the paper clothes of the homeless,
and when he walked down into the birdless
air west of Atlanta, how they took him in
with the gentle, deadly love of junkies.
-- First published in The Gettysburg Review
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