Claire T. Feild
The April Selected Poet is Claire T. Feild
Please feel free to email Claire at: ctillandsia@gmail.com
A RECEDING
She is receding into the shadows,
away from dusk.
Ebony is calling her to its blackness,
its way of life secret.
She keeps a bag of secrets in the
wilderness, ideas if blown
into the wind, will
devastate the recipient.
So she takes one secret, readying
it for flight by rubbing it
for the heat it needs to fly.
The secret tugs at the arm of a
lady shopping in the
grocery store.
Written on her arm in a cursive
black is that her grandchild
will die soon.
She weeps until she faints, others
programmed to ignore
her.
Women talking klatch are
summoned to help the
woman, the witch always
feeling guilty after one
of her dives onto evil’s
branches that clutch
her skin and then fold
her into a color wheel.
But she has the power to escape
any foreign retributions.
A CLEARING
Scanning through four boxes filled with
non-glossy memories, for her life
has been inconspicuous, she
becomes frustrated as if she
is a jaundiced professor,
counting the action-packed
months before retirement.
Thus, she tosses the boxes to the wind, its
currents taking her remains away
so that she can start over, a blithe
life her savior.
She leaves her atrium, constructing a
positive attitude by looking into
the non-brandished faces of the
poor, the ones she helps with
unconditional love and a
packhorse of money and
dry kisses.
An unknown zealot collects her memories,
and pastes them to the wall of
the left side of his hut, his
obsession with her body and
mind frivolous.
The day his hut catches on fire, he
watches it wither as he walks
around like an asterisk,
finally receiving help from
suspicious nuns.
FALCONER
He flies to her hands meekly, a piece
of food his reward.
He is “King for the Day,” the audience’s
wild claps like thunder caught in
a breeze.
Her gift of training hawks was a childhood
error, according to her mother,
who wanted her daughter to be an
astute grammarian.
After the hawk she trains dies, his soul
dies with a piece of hers.
Where can she retrieve the totality of
her inner core?
She trains another hawk who dives
quietly into her being.
Mother looks on, red appearing to
spew from her post-cataract
eyes. She places drops in her
eyes, and they steam.
Claire T. Feild has 329 poems accepted for print publication in 107 journals and anthologies such as the following:
The Tulane Review, Wordplay; Spillway; Poeming Pigeons; The Carolina Quarterly; Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley; and The Best of the Vine Leavs Literary Journal.
Her first poetry book is Mississippi Delta Women in Prism. Her second creative nonfiction book is titled A Delta Vigil: Yazoo City, Mississippi, the 1950s.
Her chapbook, The Mississippi Delta: Nonfiction Stories, is forthcoming. Her book of poetry The Dawn of Dusk and Shadows is also forthcoming.