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

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.

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