The evening before leavingI shot Eric’s 12 gaugeout the back of his shackinto the flourishing greenof the big, June woods.My first time with a gun-there is no promise but lotsof intimacy like Ashbery saysof the sea. A buzzard slopes overthe highway. Who knewthis rural fix for east-coast neurosiswas waiting for me with its dogwoods,its poor possum roadkill,and the high, evening cloudsthat bring shy wild turkeysup the hillside. Hegel saysthe wounds of the spirit heal,and leave no scars. But timeis just like the rest of usand wants more drinkswhen it starts having drinks at the bar.
Avery County
Sarah Stickney
Feature Date
- June 16, 2022
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Copyright © 2022 by Sarah Stickney.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Sarah Stickney’s poems have appeared in journals such as Crazyhorse, Massachusetts Review, Guesthouse Lit, Forklift Ohio, and others. Her chapbook Portico was selected by Thomas Lux as the 2016 winner of Emrys Press’s annual competition. Her co-translations of Elisa Biagini’s selected poems, The Guest in the Wood, won the Best Translated Book Award for poetry in 2014, and a more complete collection of Biagini’s translated work To the Teeth was published in September 2021. Stickney teaches at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Winter 22
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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