Produced by the faculty, staff, and alumni of Northern Virginia Community College and by residents of the Northern Virginia and greater Washington metropolitan areas

XXII. Snow Hill, Maryland, 1989

By G.C.Waldrep

Art about buildings & food is always really about music.
Say you’re driving along the Eastern Shore with the radio blaring
and suddenly you’re hungry and it’s summer and ahead of you
at the edge of the four-lane heat-rising mirage
you spy a drive-in—
THICK SHAKES! GOOD FOOD!—and being American
you try very hard not to think of words like architecture and edifice
so as to concentrate more completely on the hunger, on the Buick you drive
and on the speed at which you are going, which is to say
on the distance between gratification & performance, between form & content.
Being American you accomplish this with relative ease
but really it’s the music you hear
and it’s the music you keep hearing when at last you pull off the macadam
only to discover the place is closed and looks as if it has been
for what passes in these parts as a long time.

Drug Department
For Susann Cokal

by Joshua Poteat

I’m looking for a story that will light
my way out, a star in the sycamore’s grass,
taken from night and nothing and limbs cut
back from the wires. It is not summer,
there is no mist on the streets.
The yard, vacant with ivy and nest, wears brown,
and the streetlights. The sycamore is the loudest tree,
its bark lifting the hard wind like the saint
who prayed to the east and failed, parchment
spread on the monastery roof. Help me
spelled out in supplicant ink, roaring through
clots of frost. Look at us, late winter, pulling dead
branches from the fence at night to avoid the neighbors,
poison pushed under the shed for the rats.
Let’s surrender all illusions of spirit, because it deceives us.
The spirit is not air, even in its highest form,
no matter who sparks the flame.
Tonight, I suffer from not knowing
how to suffer. Tomorrow will be the same.
There used to be pills to cure this affliction.
Early decay, feebleness of will, Wonderful Little Liver Pills.
Beef, Iron and Wine for the poorest blood, for fever
of the known and unknown world.
The sycamore leans its branches on the telephone lines.
To hear them on the phone, those manuscripts of bark
breathing the wires, does nothing for my courage.
This is how you become a saint: Translate the ruins,
wherever they sleep. Bloom the tulip-tree early
and watch bees gather in the sleet. There is no abyss,
no oblivioned ocean. Just a landscape, like this one,
born from a river and seven hills, bones under
the hospital cobbles, ghost rope taut in the gallows.
The glad bees orphan their hive, too soon and unwise.
It isn’t death I want, but it isn’t life, either.

Artifact

by Claudia Emerson

For three years you lived in your house
just as it was before she died: your wedding
portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging
in the closet, her hair still in the brush.
You have told me you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed—
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.

[CLEAR AND BALMY. I ROSE AT HALF-PAST THREE]

by Adam Clay

Clear and balmy. I rose at half-past three
this morning to find insight
resting in my anatomy, despite
the truth that neither one can breathe on its own.

Perhaps a drinking man
would say it was wine which brought
my person to this point,

but there is no drink in my body.

My feet are rocks upon this fallow ground.

Silent sad indeed. What of
the scavenging animals that return nightly?
What of the rage we briefly feel as children?

What of this unsealed envelope in which we live?

Prayer II by Morgan Lucas Schuldt

             Then the sea-holly   the body’s naked fundament    its firmament   left to let-me let-me care on

behalf when wanted least from adepts

             then the might care to crave such from

             then but no

             then the mouth-colored    the intendant   the song which is inhale when kiss & then   recumbency

(the many ways it’s done)    the endless stake on the balcony    with the incurables

             then the supposes without vanity   fuck that fetches the blood down from flounce

             then gone quiet who am to you   underdangerous   without attributes   unsubstantial right through

and without clock   like snapped free the sea-holly for some sake of scenery put

             then anymore there isn’t much to control, which is purpose   a

TNVR will post a poem every day in celebration.

Diving into the Wreck

by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Forthcoming events include readings by Benjamin Percy, Dagoberto Gilb and Yusef Komunyakaa. Also check out the following exhibit Shakespeare’s Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers, 1500–1700  opening on February 3rd.