The founding director of the acclaimed InsideOut Literary Arts Project, which puts professional writers in school classrooms, Terry Blackhawk has received numerous awards for her poetry, including John Ciardi and Pablo Neruda prizes. The Light Between, her sixth collection of poetry, wends from Belle Isle to a gingko stand in Hiroshima, imagines figures from Medea to Billy Collins.
Lot's Wife
—after the sculpture of Kiki Smith
Then salt erupted
through me, bursting like seedpods,
a hissing vapor.
Now I say my gaze
will be last to go. It is
the lifetime that's passed
I struggle to see,
not this road pocked with thermal
brine, an angel's hand
forcing me forward.
I strain to hear our vanished
fountain's music fall,
but I've no magic
to turn mirage into marriage
again. Here I stand
an eroded wife,
utterly lacking in grace.
Drop by drop, grain by
relentless grain, salt
trickles down my corroded
breasts and thighs. The wind's
leathery lips skim
my skin. I have no names now —
sister, mother, friend
all sucked into this
high hot air. I've heard of tribes
to the south who lave
and bathe, oil and wrap
their beloveds' bones before
re-interring them
in the earth. Each year,
they enact this sweet respect.
Yet, dare I call it
sweet? My bones crumble
and fade. Once I believed in
the sweetness of salt.
Now all I know is its burn,
its millions of tiny flames.
—Terry Blackhawk,
from The Light Between
(Wayne State University Press)
