Kyes Stevens is a poet, small-time farmer/gardener, and founder and director of the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University. She and her partner live in Alabama and Georgia, but most of her time is spent in the lovely Waverly, Alabama. She earned an MA and MFA at Sarah […]
displayed the bloated body of a quarter horse, brown legs to the horizon. Head holding the earth— sleep in twilight the edge of error, freedom, this death.
Near Phnom Penh in the killing fields there are marshes and swamps and pits filled with skulls, leg bones, arm bones, fingers gripped around fingers, praying when they died. People annihilated. And now, a boy, who must be near nine, stands and gigs the huge frogs, fed on the rich rotted human earth. The frogs […]
the lines I watch flat into dragons and maps off the end of the world yes, there be dragons in creases of a young mother’s folded belly skin and dreadlocks pulled because there was no other way I find my grandfather and the line I watched disappear from PQRS peaks to Sahara except the sands […]
The sprout from a wind-whipped seedling. Echoes off the side of green mountains curl around river stones, toss secrets to one day light on a field of sparrow-brown cut grass orbited by a hawk that flies above you, whose red-tipped feather falls to me with the smell of you in the garden drinking a cup […]
The moon a shallow sail and night, a smooth timbered sea—waters encourage day birds to sweet spring sleep—rest from a day of feeding. Big rigs, cars and trucks on the highway—clear with the pines now cut— splits in the land open silence, exposed. The live-trap is set—freezer-burnt sausage baits the tom who holed my not-so-brave […]
The grapefruit sized eastern box-turtles blend into the fall leaves—burnt yellow of a maple the same as the lines patterning squares. A herd of dogs rushes the woods— bounding toward the river— great anticipation of a drink, sticks thrown. You—knowing the woods tread quickly toward the destination—and I willfully lag behind, enticed by the huge […]
It is finding love and then figuring the plan, where wall meets wall, or window or a door to somewhere else. Nails shot to timbers, arrows into hearts. Paint the grey sheetrock some color that births joy. A shade of sky that evokes passion in rest. Conceal the wood, the innards of the house that […]