I relish the year’s first
cherries from California,
or the Midi of France,
wherever there are workers
well enough to pick, not
yet too sick to spoil
this jubilee of my own.
One that scoffs at Escoffier,
at the august Auguste,
if not Victoria herself.
No glace à la vanille.
Just a bowl to hold
the dark sweet
(washed) fruit itself,
and a tiny cup
wherein to spit,
afterwards,
the pit
breathing
in and out
in and out
while
sleeping
waking
drinking
aching
walking
talking
kissing
blissing
when
it stops
does it stop
on the in
or the out
Author Bio:
Janet Joyner was a professor of French Language and Literature at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts until her retirement in 1994. She is a winner of the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and have won distinctions in Bay Leaves of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, in Flying South ’14 and ’15, Second Spring ’16 and 17, as well as finalist and semi-finalist distinctions for the Poet’s Billow 2016 Prize, and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Bridport Prize. Her “Cicadas Thrumming” was anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, volume vii, North Carolina. Her short stories have appeared in The Crescent Review and Flying South. She is the translator of Le Dieu désarmé by Luc-François Dumas. Waterborne, Joyner’s first collection of poems and winner of the 2016 Holland Prize, reflects the importance of her native, low-country South Carolina, its rivers and peoples. Place and name, the currency of belonging, are essential to the poet’s encounter with the world. She has three collections to date: Yellow, Finishing Line Press, 2018; Wahee Neck, Hermit Feathers Press, 2019, (with Now Come Hyacinths scheduled for release in 2020).
cherries from California,
or the Midi of France,
wherever there are workers
well enough to pick, not
yet too sick to spoil
this jubilee of my own.
One that scoffs at Escoffier,
at the august Auguste,
if not Victoria herself.
No glace à la vanille.
Just a bowl to hold
the dark sweet
(washed) fruit itself,
and a tiny cup
wherein to spit,
afterwards,
the pit
breathing
in and out
in and out
while
sleeping
waking
drinking
aching
walking
talking
kissing
blissing
when
it stops
does it stop
on the in
or the out
Author Bio:
Janet Joyner was a professor of French Language and Literature at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts until her retirement in 1994. She is a winner of the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and have won distinctions in Bay Leaves of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, in Flying South ’14 and ’15, Second Spring ’16 and 17, as well as finalist and semi-finalist distinctions for the Poet’s Billow 2016 Prize, and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Bridport Prize. Her “Cicadas Thrumming” was anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, volume vii, North Carolina. Her short stories have appeared in The Crescent Review and Flying South. She is the translator of Le Dieu désarmé by Luc-François Dumas. Waterborne, Joyner’s first collection of poems and winner of the 2016 Holland Prize, reflects the importance of her native, low-country South Carolina, its rivers and peoples. Place and name, the currency of belonging, are essential to the poet’s encounter with the world. She has three collections to date: Yellow, Finishing Line Press, 2018; Wahee Neck, Hermit Feathers Press, 2019, (with Now Come Hyacinths scheduled for release in 2020).
RSS Feed