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.
CALLIE PLAXO
Perhaps in the picture book
where the ocean blue morning
floats on the page, the birds flap
about searching for me.
Searching for a place to land.
How they love the taste of lashes,
the scent of iris. Once I floated
right out of the story into
the sea of black all oil and sun
still not rising. In that episode
the other one, the one in the window,
slips in like a ghost. She drinks
my coffee, she scribbles with my pen.
But the ink is intoxicating
and there she drowns. I am flapping
my wings drenched in oil. I am
waiting for these pesky sparrows
to lift me up by my open eyelids.
The pool of light at her feet
disappears while the sun blinks.
As if someone took scissors
and cut a hole in the sky.
As if the sun traded itself for a ring of gold
like the one on her finger, like her own
hazel iris dilated in an attempt
to see, if only she could see the quiet,
a synesthetic rush. She feels certain
she could be any number of things
within reach, the tree and its branches,
any one of its leaves – or all of them – the soil
beneath her. How quickly
she is blotted out, how delightful
the becoming of thinglessness.
She is exalted. She is bloated with joy
both hers and all that is not hers.
And when the moment is complete
the sun undoes itself to its fullness
just as soon as it began.
The quiet hastens to birdsong.
As her grandmother once said, Callie Plaxco flew the coop when she left South Carolina to journey west to the University of Wyoming for her MFA in Creative Writing. Still in Wyoming, Callie lives with her husband, two small boys, and two big dogs. Her chapbook Dear Person is available at Dancing Girl Press and individual poems have appeared in Carve Magazine, Tinderbox, Gingerbread House and Sugar House Review. She is the 2024 recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council's Neltje Blanchan Writing Award.
