STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
KATHY NELSON
Reach into blue and out in all directions. Shed light like water.
Bloom in Nashville, Nagadoches, Napa like the magnolias.
Wax white and comely, withholding nothing. Believe me, I
did not intend to leave you here alone under the magnolias.
If you would relent and tune your innermost ear to my voice,
we might gossip like the geese overhead about the magnolias.
Take your sweet magnolia time like cumulus slow-dancing.
Find me in the inkblot on the sunlit wall by the magnolias.
Go on as long as you need to about your sorrow—the distant hills
are carrying on and on and on and on about the magnolias.
The name I’d have called you if I’d known how to love you—
dream it. Slumber in the cool and dusk of the magnolias.
Kathy Nelson, recipient of the James Dickey Prize and MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books). Her work appears in About Place, LEON Literary Review, New Ohio Review, The Cortland Review, Tar River Poetry, Stirring Literary Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
