Up the driveway into the house in one hand she carries the fish in its body bag of ice, the thickness of it curled into itself, in the other she clutches a handful of a woman’s name say Daisy say Scarlett petals and yellow sassafras, she cuts the bottom of each green stem at an angle. Outside the frame of the kitchen window cicadas discuss the world while the sun creeps away— How does she find the music to say today there has been no tragedy— The flowers are safe in their glass house necks upright then look solitary hiker black dot on a canvas an insect treks the expanse of the wooden floor hush hush thing so confident it moves away from harm—
Feature Date
- September 11, 2023
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
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Copyright © 2023 by Niki Herd.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Niki Herd is the author of the poetry collection The Language of Shedding Skin and the chapbook don’t you weep, and she co-edited Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master with Meg Day. Herd’s poetry, essays, and criticism appear in Gulf Coast, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, New England Review, Copper Nickel, Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Obsidian, and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Ucross, Bread Loaf, the Newberry Library, and Cave Canem. Herd earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She currently lives in St. Louis where she is the Visiting Writer in Residence in Poetry at Washington University. Her second full-length poetry collection, The Stuff of Hollywood, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.
Winter/Spring 2023
Houston, Texas
University of Houston
Editor
Justin Jannise
Managing Editor
Paige Quiñones
Poetry Editors
Josh English
Devereux Fortuna
Nicholas Rattner
Begun by Donald Barthelme and Phillip Lopate, Gulf Coast is the nationally-distributed journal housed within the University of Houston’s English Department.
Gulf Coast is still student-run. We seek to promote and publish quality literature in our local and national communities while simultaneously teaching excellence in literary publishing to graduate and undergraduate students. While we are committed to providing a balanced combination of literary approaches and voices, all of the editorial positions are two-year terms, thus ensuring a regular turnover in the specific personality and style of the journal.
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