Poetry

Check out my poem "And I Thought of Glass Flowers" in the Winter 2014/15 issue of The Georgia Review http://garev.uga.edu/winter14/christie.pdf

This is a glass cactus and flower from the Harvard Glass Flower exhibit. For the poem "Silence" by Marianne Moore also to do with the Harvard Glass Flowers, go here: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/silence-2

Check out Christie's online Poem of the Week at the Missouri Review (September 1, 2014)
http://www.missourireview.com/archives/a-v-christie-corn-maze/

And purchase a copy of the Fall Issue 2014 of New Ohio Review to read her poem "The Soul All Morning"

Look for new poems forthcoming in the Gettysburg Review.

Atmosphere

The canals of Mars

beseech various oxides, vast

dust storms

of a dulled red,

a daytime warmth

that only reaches so far.

Let’s call these fissures canals

so we’ll think of Venice

looking through our telescope

as Mars comes this close

in this our anniversary year

with its thin atmosphere

and, to be probed,

its extreme cold.

A.V. Christie / Source: Poetry (October 2009).

Foreword

I was conceived in the cruelest month

in whatever spring California could muster.

A little rain—with some more likely.

And the buckeyes were they yet on the ground?

Damn my father’s smooth stone eyes,

other prevailing enticements and what Eliot called

the female stench. Damn the oaks,

their histrionics, struggling in the fog.

Spiderwebs lay in the grass, misted

and looking like misspent galaxies.

I cry into and out of this moment.

Pound told Eliot: strike this and this.

What was weak got dropped, and the poem

stood stronger without it.

A.V. Christie / Source: Poetry (October 2009).

The Hen Swallows a Worm or Slug

We scratch at the backyard together

through leaf mould, worm casings she kicks off

in a fan behind her. I use a stick

to dig, to find for her what she’s shown me

near the roots, at the edge of a step—sticky

slug on the underside of a hosta’s leaf.

How complicated she is and how resigned.

Between her beak and my outstretched hand,

the worm’s writhing. Then the long slick going

down. It fills the throat, like all that’s swallowed.

Her head chucks it back,

for the worm again dark.

The hen’s pupil dilates.

She wends and follows.

Her queries, sighs, low gurgles, the hastening

click of her nails on pavement then hungry

again into the grass. Grubs are larger

than pale yellow larvae I prize from inside

chestnuts. These mucousy blind wanderers

she eats right from my palm. Nevertheless I am

repulsed by my husband’s embrace. I turn

now from his thick belly, breasts, his interests.

A body I had clambered over, loved.

I scrabble, struggle. I cover myself.

Another sticky truth dug up

that I must re-bury—

sorry on hands and knees,

hungry and wary.

A.V. Christie / Source: Poetry (October 2009).

Dusk and the Wife

in with the child
who drops like a weighted lure,
flashes down, down to sleep.
The husband suburban, pulls up
a bright folder called Taxes
in the coming dark (his young
coworker in Baja, her unfettered
surface away on vacation).

In the coming dark the grey
squirrel ripples across outside
time-lapse.

So many leaves to the trees
this many this many.

What is it then?

He opens to the red head, her
sheer bra pulled down
lush strap hard pressed
to the fullest curve of her breast.
She slightly bites her lip
while the wife half a dream away
is pressed by his good friend
against a building. They could be
in Florence—all these angels.

A.V. Christie / Source: Quarterly West (2002).

Folding the Fitted Sheet

There is a way to do this.
The sheet stiff from the line
and king-size overwhelming as an hour can be.
Arms outstretched.
She apes a stance that looks like welcoming.
This obstinate sea!
The day has been so far fear and syllables rippling.
So commence to fit each messy gather
one to the next—.

Pulled to, like a widespread inner panic managed
repeatedly.

One corner puckers, then droops— a sun
that, disaffected, simply drops from out of the sky.

In this method the right side and the wrong
confound. She says aloud the words Counterpane—
Horizon— thinks out the demands of tomorrow's
presentation, velocity, the power-point resources
circulating and the cool weight
of what gets infolded.

We watch her,
the one moving deeply along a nerve—
toward some far city or god.

A.V. Christie / Source: Cave Wall (2009).

Already the Heart

The spinal cord blossoms
like bright, bruised magnolia
into the brainstem.
And already the heart
in its depth — who could assail it?
Bathed in my voice, all branching
and dreaming. The flowering
and fading — said the poet —
come to us both at once.
Here is your best self,
and the least, two sparrows
alight in the one tree
of your body.

A.V. Christie / The Housing

Poems "Outdoor Room" and "Signs" and "Willingly"

http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n2/poetry/christie_a/index.shtml

Poems "Garden Essai" and "An Economy"

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/two-poems-4

Already the Heart

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