Swamp
is all about
quiet death
and the slow
cellular work
of decompostion
in a wet
dark place.
Say it. The word
itself, breaching
with that swishing
sucking, sibilant
swooping its
big wings
around an ample,
nasal-vowelled body
detonated by a plosive
that lifts
like a long-legged bird.
After the rape
of the three little
girls in the grass
by the Maoist
army, there was
no grass left.
Janet Joyner’s prize-winning poems have been honored in the 2011 Yearbook of the South Carolina Poetry Society, Bay Leaves of the North Carolina Poetry Council in 2010, 2011, Flying South in 2014, and in 2015, as well as anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, volume vii, North Carolina, and Second Spring 2016, 2017, 2018. Her first collection of poems, Waterborne, is the winner of the Holland Prize and was published by Logan House in February, 2016. Her chapbook, “Yellow,” was published by Finishing Line Press in November, 2018. Wahee Neck, her third collection, will be published this summer by Hermit Feathers Press.
