Anti-Ars Poetica
by Corrie Williamsonfor Steve Scafidi
There are days the anger
dries it up. There’s the sense
that the driver pulled over,
lugged the unicorn into
his pickup, opened the pale
hide with a buck knife,
fed the red wet flesh
through a slurping grinder
& into neat white packages
with a pleasant heft
& tossed the horn
to the dogs. The sense
that he didn’t. & what if
the brown stains on fingertips
& the shapeliness of cedar
planed to silt’s smoothness
will not send a child
to college? For most, a man
splitting wood remains
meaningless. What if it all
just means what it means?
Corrie Williamson is the author of Sweet Husk, which won the 2014 Perugia Press Prize and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia Poetry Award. She is currently at work on a manuscript of poems that travel between modern day Montana, where she lives, and early 19th century Fincastle, Virginia and St. Louis, Missouri, where they trace the voice and history of Julia Hancock Clark, the woman who married explorer William Clark and followed him west. Poems from this manuscript have recently appeared in AGNI, 32 Poems, Terrain.Org, Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, and other journals.
