D. M. Spratley
D. M. Spratley is a Black, queer, Southern writer. She received her MFA from Hollins University. Her poems appear in Rattle and Drunken Boat, and she has received awards from Princeton University and Rattle. These poems belong to a completed chapbook manuscript, entitled Bloodroot. Find her on Twitter @dmsprat.
Reading List
The Road Over Catawba Mountain
The road over Catawba Mountain is jealous of the roads surrounding Catawba Mountain. The roads at its feet birth houses and little gas stations made of diesel pumps and beef jerky. People who walk those roads, or hustle bicycles over them, or stand planted in front of a duffel bag, thumb climbing at a car’s […]
Disappearing Act
His sisters boil yams, watching air, like salmon, furrow the water. There are ways of telling someone is becoming smaller, and our mother wrinkles her forehead full of shadows, patterns tea leaves in the shape of a fist. This is not what we’ve been waiting for the whole week, sweet potato smell tumbling through the […]
Before the Fall
I have sat today on my porch becoming another soft and malleable extension of my small front yard. I have watched endlessly as the spring cankerworms list down from the trees where they hatched, propelled by the expulsion of their own silk. I have seen most reach the ground but some stop midair as if […]