The Poetry Box

Wendy Erd

“Listening for the Rain”
by Wendy Erd

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book cover of IT'S A CROOKED ROAD, BUT NOT FAR, TO THE HOUSE OF FLOWERS
“Listening for the Rain” by Wendy Erd, published in It’s a Crooked Road, but Not Far, to the House of Flowers, released in November 2023, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Please enjoy the poem, and feel free to leave a comment.

Listening for the Rain

by Wendy Erd

 

Everyday is like this,
the short and long of forgetting:
a man with a walking stick, a limp,
his daughter in a red sweatshirt,
crossing the berm.

Ten years from now
will they remember
that the beach they walked
smelled of rain,
that drops made small ticks
on his ballcap,
feathers on cheeks, set
diamonds in her hair?

If we could remember not only the rain
but the weight of the damp jacket,
not only the jacket but the ease
our bodies have moving through time
beside another
without the word why.
On a cold, salt-wet afternoon,
the vapor of our breath
rising ahead of us
trailing behind.

from It’s a Crooked Road, but Not Far, to the House of Flowers by Wendy Erd (The Poetry Box, 2023)
nominated for The Pushcart Prize by Shawn Aveningo Sanders, editor/publisher

The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 13, 2024)

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The Poetry Box LIVE – January Edition!

Saturday, January 13, 2024 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

[3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)]

 

Featured Poets:

  • Wendy Erd (Alaska) – author of It’s a Crooked Road, but Not Far, to the House of Flowers
  • Steven Croft(Georgia) – author of At Home with the Dreamlike Earth
  • Penelope Scambly Schott(Oregon) – author of gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament

 

Enjoy a Video from the Show:

 

About the Featured Poets

 

For twenty years, Wendy Erd traveled between Alaska and Asia supporting indigenous and seldom heard communities to voice their stories through exhibit and film. Now at home in Alaska, mornings begin in front of the wood stove with coffee, a stack of poetry books and her husband as they read poems aloud to begin each day.

Her writing appears as prose on road signs in Alaska’s Copper River watershed and as poems along an estuary trail in Homer, Alaska. She’s received several statewide literary awards. Her work has been published by the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Rivers Press, Cirque, and anthologized in Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Ocean They Fish. In collaboration with her dear friend, Lê Phương, their poetry translations were published in The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. She envisioned and coordinated Poems in Place, a project that placed poetry by Alaskan poets on signs in Alaska’s state parks.

You can order Wendy’s new book HERE

 

Steven Croftlives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. He is the author of three previous chapbooks: Coastal Scenes (The Saltmarsh Press, 2002), Moment and Time (The Saltmarsh Press, 2015), and New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, Chestnut Review, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

You can order Steven’s new book HERE

 

Penelope Scambly Schott worships daily by climbing Dufur hill and sitting on her favorite rock. From there she can see two states and five mountains. She is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

You can order Penelope’s new chapbook HERE