Laura-Gray Street is the author of the poetry collection Pigment Fume (Salmon Poetry, 2014). Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Shenandoah, Meridian, The Notre Dame Review, Poetry Daily, The Greensboro Review, The Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere, and she co-edited The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013). She has received fellowships and awards from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Southern Women Writers Conference, the […]
This is the boy who calls it nigger dog and kicks hard at its tobacco-yellow ribs. This is the woman, just a volunteer who looks and looks away. This is the bone crack you can’t hear with so many kids yelling. This is what you hear—this is shut yo watch this ain’t naw you it— […]
Winter convinced me I was impermeable. Today I’ve moved a lawn chair close enough to prop my legs on the fence and doze, light pressed like thumbs against my eyelids. I’d drink this sun with my veins if I were green and growing, with chloroplasts instead of follicles. When I blink away phantom spots, I […]
In Paris she can-canned without panties. Summers she swam naked in the Atlantic and smoked a pipe. For a pet she kept a diamond she named […]
But it should have fur and sun. Shaking the fern fronds, the small dog windeth. She stands, forepaws perched on wickerback, peering for squirrels. What do you do with the no-longer-husband in the son? With the you in the daughter? I’d like something beautiful here, something profound, not this untuned piano […]
It’s not what they are singing, it’s that they are singing. —from a comment on Georg Baselitz’s painting “The Brücke Choir” In the museum the young girl swung her mother’s long-handled purse. The docent gasped as she cycloned toward Art. Toward […]
Laura-Gray Street, associate professor of English at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia (questions posed by Camille Dungy), on the process of writing her poem “Recreation Center.”
Laura-Gray Street, assistant professor of English at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia (questions posed by Camille Dungy), on revision