it’s too early for the birds’ song,for their misshapen truths.i am still herein morningwounds unpeeled, wherethe shadow of an image dances— a dead line, bent by the oak’s snapped bark, a call dropped when the nascent navy sky cracked.i look for my mother and see her swallowing a wad of gnats my grandmother clasps her hands in prayer. the trees — the eyesof ancestors, thefish in the pond — whistle.
maternal dreamscape
Victoria Stitt
Feature Date
- March 6, 2022
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Copyright © 2021 by Victoria Stitt.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Victoria Stitt is a poet currently consuming surrealist and Afrofuturist texts and films, while writing strange dreamscapes of their own. Their poem “windekind farm, vt” was nominated for Best of the Net, and their work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Blood Orange Review, Harbor Review, LEON Literary Review, Yes Poetry, and others. A Philadelphia native, Victoria is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College and has earned degrees from Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania. They teach English at The Lawrenceville School, aiming to instill in their students a sense of urgency for achieving social justice and a love for writing.
Vol. 71.1
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
UNC Chapel Hill
Editor-in-Chief
Ellie Rambo
Poetry Editor
Colin Dekeersgieter
Managing Editor
Amy Chan
The Carolina Quarterly publishes a variety of poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and artwork twice a year and is distributed to readers locally and to individual subscribers, public and university libraries, and bookstores in the United States and worldwide. Back issues are sold throughout the year. Free online access to the full-text of our current and back issues is available through the academic databases, EBSCO and ProQuest.
The Carolina Quarterly has been publishing established and emergent writers for 65 years. Recent issues have featured the works of Lauri Anderson, James Gordon Bennett, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Sean Bishop, Nicole Terez Dutton, Aaron Gwyn, K.A. Hays, Caitlin Horrocks, Stuart Nadler, Ben Purkert, Valerie Sayers, Ken Taylor, Matthew Volmer, G.C. Waldrep, Jerald Walker, and more. Pieces published in The Carolina Quarterly have appeared in New Stories from the South, Best of the South, Poetry Daily, O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prizes, and Best American Short Stories.
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