PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Anne Colwell

Anne Colwell
USA

Anne Colwell, a poet and fiction writer, is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Delaware. She published two books of poems, Believing Their Shadows (Word Poetry 2010) and Mother’s Maiden Name (Word Poetry 2013) as well as a book about Elizabeth Bishop (Inscrutable Houses, University of Alabama). She received the Established Artist in Fiction Fellowship and the Established Artist in Poetry Fellowship from the Delaware State Arts Council, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and three Work-Study Fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her chapbook - Father’s Occupation, Mother’s Maiden Name - won the National Association of Press Women’s Award for Best Book of Verse. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several journals, including: Valparaiso Review, Mudlark, r.kv.r.y, Southern Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Prime Number, and Octavo.

Funerals and Fairy Tales

In Czechoslovakia, a steel mill worker stood on an overturned crate and proclaimed, or proclaimed again, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Here in an American December, I stood in front of Macy’s perfume counter and wished this Christmas I could buy you a present. The counter was a glass box with gold-edged trim; bottles lay inside curved like women. I remembered seven dwarves mourning around a jewelcase like that, glass sides and gold, lined with pillows, fat satin pillows for the crow black hair and blood red lips. You and I went to many funerals, followed the obligatory hearse through iron gates to Holy Angels or Saint Anne’s, climbed out of our Ford, walked to the plot, the ground uneven, mean with frozen ruts. Or, after the thaw, our spiked heels wobbled, sinking into loose soil where something might grow. Mourning always made you sober. But then, like Snow White, you never stayed frightened for long. The witch in any disguise, the most perfunctory old rags, could make you drink. No song, no small neat cottage, no dwarf love could be as red as that apple, all rotted inside, fermented. Until finally I walked from your grave into the salt dry snow of December. The family ate chicken together and were secretly relieved. The world was instantly new the moment you left it, hopeful for the first time and irredeemably lost. In Romania, there will be enough food for the winter; kerchiefed women stand in meat lines grinning. The gruesome dictator has been deposed. And children, whom years of rationing have deprived, who’ve weathered one after another cruel eastern winter, have oranges, real oranges for the first time, and not knowing the first thing about the sweet pulp of the center, they bite right through the bitter rind.

-- from Believing Their Shadows

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