STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
PAM DAVENPORT
You are a June bug and a legally blind genius and a single calla lily. You are a wooden bench dedicated to a surfer taken by a wave, and you are a coral snake. You are also a bowl of salty peanuts and white lace curtains and fizz in the nose from ginger ale on ice. You are a Carolina reaper chili and a glass of milk. You are the bubble man and the cookie lady. You are a Slabside Cobra and a rice paddy. You are the one who opens the door to the process server. You are a waterfall and the well the little girl fell into. You are the melon rose and the bag of chicken wing bones leaking grease. World, we need to talk. I’m trying to understand relativity and singularity. I’ve given up wondering what magma is doing inside the volcano. World, your rate of speed confounds me. I’m looking back at you from Earendel. I’m adding dignity and mashed fennel to stew. I finally threw out the broken printer and crushed some oak leaves. Let’s do this. Let’s fly moth-like toward the light. Let’s dance like Elaine. Let’s love the lady slipper orchid and the black-billed hummingbird, but not too much. You know how we can be, dear world.
At 1:30 a.m. your machines stop and stay off.
Of some concern the CPAPs, but really no disaster
even if you have no power to facilitate flushing,
even if you cannot bake a cake or perform endoscopy exams
here at your rented beach house,
so get it done by hand or not at all, but wait,
why not walk out to where white wings
soar above a blue-green sea as an idea takes hold.
Keep looking because you miss so much, like that
red-billed tern, and others untethered to devices––
the curlew who knows breezes because her life depends
on knowing breezes, maybe yours does too, notice
how wind lifts your hair just off your forehead,
how it stirs the drapes and picks up a hint of shrimp
in this unquantifiable air––it is not nothing to know
want from need––you see now the rare art before you
sticking out of sand stripped of leaves––
white wood that was once a tree.
Pam Davenport lives in the low desert and the mountains of Arizona and earned her MFA at Pacific University. Her chapbook, A Midwest Girl Thanks Patti Smith (2019), was winner of the Slipstream Chapbook Competition. Pam has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and honored with the Arizona Authors’ Association Annual Award for Poetry. Her poems have been published in Nimrod, Thrush, Tinderbox, Slippery Elm, Poetry of the American Southwest, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, among others.
