Alice Friman
Alice Friman has new poetry forthcoming in Ploughshares, Georgia Review, and Negative Capability. Her sixth collection is The View from Saturn, LSU. A new collection, Blood Weather, is due from LSU in 2019. She's the winner of many awards, the latest, the 2016 Paumanok Poetry Award. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she was poet-in-residence at Georgia College.
Reading List
Dumped at Heaven’s Gate
When a hurricane spirals down, spinning like an unhooked tongue shrieking in the wind’s wet mouth, beheading trees and cracking open the sky, pregnant cows in the fields let down their calves. Whether the cause is barometric pressure or the …
The Toad
Yesterday I found a desiccated toad, sucked out and weightless. Each toe – long, curved, delicate as eyelash. The twin eye sockets, the slit of the mouth, the froggy bend of the back knees flexed to jump. Only the insides …
“Deep Purple”
Monday, and today’s job is cleanup. I’m humming an old song to keep me company, something about purple and a garden wall. The children are concerned, for it was only yesterday I measured out my future, stretching greedy-big as …
Otma Rood
Shackled to that name, by fifteen she knew the rest the stars dished out would stack up equal: a mother-in-law who cooked forty years for the railroad, raising eight perfect kids to boot. And Joe, shot dead in the grocery …
The Joker
A house of cards has no window. No kitchen, no tarts. The queen, with all her hearts, holds no more sway than a four. The king, equal to a deuce or that knave, the town crier with a bell, announcing …
Coming Home
Click to hear Alice Friman read her poem, “Coming Home” Early March, and a pale sky tightens down spiteful. What clump of green there is seems vulgar, out of place, superfluous as last year’s newspaper or the curtain in that …
Speaking of Belief
Somehow the mimosa, chopped down in all her grace, has produced an heir. The stump has delivered a twig: a wee surrogate big in bravery, tribute to no one but a dead mother who believed. This faith business, a mama’s …
The Navel
The brain’s most amazing function is that it enables us to think about how we think. I say, mucking in the frontal cortex, stirring the neural soup, makes for migraines. Since when was the navel we so loved to gaze …
The Argiope
[audio:http://shanendoah.wpenginepowered.com/612/files/2011/08/Alice_The-Argiope.mp3|titles=The Argiope] Between the weeping cherry and the porch, the argiope floats head down at the center of an enviable patience. Her egg sac—little ochre marble, little kindergarten sun— pasted to the rail: another Pandora’s hope at the bottom of …