Chapbook

Creek Lover

$10 – Shipping included
Paperback, handbound.
23 pages

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Excerpts from Creek Lover

CRAB ON THE LOOSE

After Ross Gay                                                             

It was luring it with chicken necks from the butcher
until he clamped one hard with his blue fist
then hoisting him, all swashbuckle and ire

into the white plastic bucket, the clatter
watching him ponder      ponder
all tense, crouched, that made me know

how far a blue streak can go
made me know         pride is a heaviness
at the bottom of a bucket

and it was standing eyeball vs. eyeball
him watching my face close-up
made me lift, and tip the bucket out

his hard body hitting the dock
made me know                letting things go
and it was two blue pistols in the air, backing up

all don’t move and no one gets hurt
one leg over the weathered edge
still firing bullets across the bow

then falling to the creek below
made me know something      about myself
who I saw, one moment before

he finally dropped from sight.

WHEN WE WERE BIRDS

Swallows tumble
from my throat
which is to say

I can’t shut up.
Too many words
beating their wings

in vain; your starling eyes
shape-shifting
in the sky.

There was a time
we held hands:
two cozy sandpipers

chasing each other
down the beach, now—
I’m a clamoring seagull

mistaking specks of trash
for morsels of kindness.
While you, sharp-clawed osprey,

fly off, my heart
gaffed in your grip
like a cold, dead fish.

READINGS

Listen to Lupita Eyde-Tucker read some poems from Creek Lover.

Some of you know that I participated in a chapbook workshop back in October 2017 (you can read a post about it here). The workshop was 8 weeks long and was an incredible time of sustained creativity for me. Since then, I’ve been editing and revising the manuscript I began writing in that workshop, as well as writing new poems. This past summer 2019, I gave a reading of that manuscript in Pawleys Island, and afterwards so many people encouraged me to publish it. This chapbook is the finished product.