Charlotte Matthews is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, Green Stars (Iris Press, 2005), andStill Enough to be Dreaming (Iris Press, 2007). She is also the author of two chapbooks, A Kind of Devotion(Palanquin Press, 2004), and Biding Time (Half Moon Bay Press, 2005). Her work has recently appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Borderlands, Tar River Poetry, and The Potomac Review. She […]
Starting in late February my mother would cut the weather page out of the newspaper and put it on the refrigerator as a sign of hope: each day a minute or two more light. But it’s autumn now. This week the time changed, and it’s dark by six. Think of it as temporary, I […]
In spring, tilled fields stand immaculate, carved with distinct grooves of plain earth where seed will wait through the last nights of frost It’s the same as my mother waiting: uncertain and alone upstairs in her sitting room far into morning. Though the slit of my bedroom door, the hazy shaft of light and the […]
Lucy lives behind the house back of the barn, red oil drums set out to catch the rain. The afternoon has almost emptied, light moving in starts over the eastern trees. She is outside sweeping her dust yard into perfect swirls, the wings of a night moth. She does this so that grass won’t grow […]
When the war came over the radio, my mother, the youngest and at home, heard the single words like trinkets to collect, buttons portioned in flowered boxes, and loved some, their feel on her tongue. She must have heard the Sunday announcer and thought it was the same as always, the brief news. But then […]
It won’t be long before the designs you form are echoed in the shivering leaves of an ash tree right there on the hillside and because it’s November those patterns will remain all winter long, a sort of engraved, emblazoned pattern. You are walking cautiously and must be able to read the stones: […]
The only child bears down on the paper: drawing the hiding places, every place she might have dreamed of, the unlit closet she sinks into beneath stored bags of clothing, heat from the chimney untraceable and fine as gossamer. Is there anything else to be said? Like the very last moments of daylight, the night […]
The day I walk all ten miles of the Ridge Road, I stop to ask for water from a man whose tended garden blooms against the chipped metal of his trailer where his wife shifts about in the heat praying that a storm will rise over the near mountains. The water is sweet and I […]