Kansas coos me into its wheat.Done with direction, I follow the lightning,God’s arrows insisting even the desolate can be a destination.In the black and white of a winter dawn a train zippers the wet land to a sky clouded with intention.It looks more like a photographthan a photograph resembles the momentit captures, its frame diverting, its filterslanting truths. Say I make of this a photo— what would the evidence show?That I was in a body here for awhileand I wanted this to mean something? Is this the alibi or the crime?And who is the jury to receive this—no oneknows I’m here. I loaded the car in Technicolorand drove east—had done milked the westof fresh starts—but the time changed so I don’t know when I am.Kansas says it does not matter. Timerolls over its husks and soil like fog, changingnothing. So much land— anyone could be buried out here.
Unmappable
Feature Date
- June 21, 2019
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Copyright © 2018 by Erin Adair-Hodges
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Erin Adair-Hodges is the author of for Let’s All Die Happy, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. A Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholar in Poetry, Sewanee-Claudia Emerson scholar, and winner of The Sewanee Review’s Allen Tate Prize and the Loraine Williams Prize from The Georgia Review, her work can be seen in journals such Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner and more. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Missouri and the Poetry Editor for Pleiades.
Summer 2018
Sewanee, Tennessee
University of the South
Editor
Adam Ross
Managing Editor & Poetry Editor
Eric Smith
Assistant Editors
Hellen Wainaina
Jennie Vite
Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is the longest-running literary quarterly in America. The SR has published many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Hannah Arendt, and Ezra Pound. The Review has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent, from excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels to the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “ it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.
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