Called workshopped, then edited. Half the words blanked out by White Out. Another third redacted by a chisel tip Sharpee. What’s left is the fact that you left me feeling stranded, marooned, stuck in an ocean of soundless nouns and listless verbs, feeling deprived of all those names and places that did not survive as though I had arrived out of nowhere. The hand that rocked the cradle, the boat, the dining room table, turned slap-happy. As if stung by a bee, then by many.
Deborah H. Doolittle hhas lived in lots of different places, but now calls North Carolina home. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Floribunda (Main Street Rag) and three chapbooks, No Crazy Notions (Birch Brook Press), That Echo (Longleaf Press), and Bogbound (Orchard Street Press). Some of her poems have recently appeared (or will soon appear) in Cloudbank, Comstock Review, Kakalak, Iconoclast, Ravensperch, Slant, The Stand, and in audio format on The Writer’s Almanac. She shares a home with her husband, four housecats, and a backyard full of birds.
