Charlotte Pence’s first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), won Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award (silver medalist) and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize. The book explores her father’s chronic homelessness while simultaneously detailing the physiological changes that enabled humans to form cities, communities, and households. The director of creative writing at University of South Alabama, she is also the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics (University Press of Mississippi, 2012). Poems have recently been published in Epoch, Harvard Review, and The Southern Review.
Black Silhouettes Against a Pink Sunset
They move
more like darkness
than deer,
this trio
who nibble
knee-high
bluegrass,
this trio
I mistook
as straight-backed,
head-bowed,
night
nipping the edges
of field and forest,
while the sunset
behind them
slices sky
a blinding pink.
This trio stop
and start
and stop
along the same path
my family
of three
walk
“for air.”
What is
air
but shared
possibility?
And what
is the name
for those
moments
when worry
feels distant
and tamed–
when we
return
to deer
to darkness
to certainty
that this coming night
is neither for
nor against us.
DNA Searches for Her Mother
Curling around myself, I went
to the center, copying hard, searching
for our dead mother’s eyes.
Granted, they were brown. But in her brown,
a toasty alternated with something wobbly.
A plain girl on a rusted green bike.
A spot on a decaying leaf. A hesitation after
any compliment. Very pretty, she might offer.
Then, she’d clap once, ask, What’s next?
as if to suggest life means never stopping.
After months of searching, I find
the short brown rung tangled among
the green. Oh, I will see those eyes
again. Memory, I knew not to depend on you.
After Election Day: A Tanka
— November, 2016
Wide-eyed wind stirs sand
beneath the broiling storm clouds,
thick with heat and rain.
A dog charges from the dunes,
our fear cradled in his mouth.
Panhandler Magazine 