New Logging Road

by Amy Wright & William Wright

Dusk takes a bow rake to its sweetheart
puddles. Sallies slip into red clay mud, nitrogen
contaminant permeating their velvety
salt lick of skin. Mother turns the tongues
of our boots out, upturns the hubcap
and rebar sundial, draws the curtains
so we can be ourselves.

Upstairs wind scratches
screen rust. The waft of wisteria rot
lifts and catches the fresh lumber
smell of the wet sill.
Head on a pillow
of swimming hole-side clothes,
bare feet tugging the sheets
until she falls asleep, to cat
through the night-aired backyard
and question the left equipment
with the scent glands of our hands.

AMY WRIGHT is the author of Everything in the Universe (Iris Press 2016), Cracker Sonnets(Brick Road Poetry Press 2016), and five chapbooks. She is also Nonfiction Editor of Zone 3 Press, and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University. Some of her work, which has appeared in Brevity, Kenyon Review, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other journals, is online at www.awrightawright.com.

WILLIAM WRIGHT is author of nine collections of poetry: five full-length books, including Tree Heresies (Mercer University Press, 2015) and Night Field Anecdote (Louisiana Literature Press, 2011) and four chapbooks. William Wright is series editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, a multivolume series celebrating contemporary writing of the American South, published by Texas Review Press. He is coeditor with Daniel Cross Turner of Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (University of South Carolina, 2016), as well as coeditor with Daniel Westover of two books focused on the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the first of which was recently released by Clemson University Press: The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Additionally, William Wright serves as assistant editor for Shenandoah and translates German poetry. Winner of the Porter Fleming Prize in Poetry, the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Prize, the Georgia Center for the Book Prize for the fifth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology (listed as one of “twenty books all Georgians should read”), and the 2016 Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, Wright has recently published in The Kenyon Review, Oxford American, The Greensboro Review, The Antioch Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review. He is married to the fiction writer Michelle Wright.