Wintering

2021 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

BY CHARLES DODD WHITE

Memory is alluvial, you explain. A flood that masks a former shape, An injured spread against a time-torn riverbank. The jealous bones beneath are leached, The pulp and membrane recede on the tide While we have the sump of mud and clay To smooth gaps in a place bent by desire.

We coupled in autumn, too late to bear later fruit, Sang one another songs of spring While departed summer kept its brood Imperfectly. Time tricked us, converted us to its Arrangement, certain that wintering would come With the calendar.

But days piled up And the burden of what we should carry Together was sloughed off, Moldered and matched itself to the muck Like it meant to shovel us under, Bury us with what wasn’t.

CHARLES DODD WHITE is the author of four books of fiction (reviewed in NCLR 2011 and NCLR Online 2013, 2020, and 2021) and an essay collection, A Year without Months (West Virginia University Press, 2022). Read his short story “Controlled Burn” in NCLR 2010. He has received the Appalachian Book of the Year Award and the Chaffin Award for his fiction. This is his first time as a finalist for the James Applewhite Poetry Prize. He lives in Knoxville, TN, where he is an Associate Professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College.

Topography of Memory, 2019 (hand-cut silk fabric, acrylic paint, threaded and mounted on canvas, 70x98x10) by Kenny Nguyen

If you were quartered by grief, I was halved. Not that my grief could master yours But so that I could fit into you, Make us more than what we were. There’s broken beauty this time of year When the freeze brittles the world And we have time to bitter our taste.

From all this, I have learned a new proverb:

Memory is a fire, I want to tell you. An army come to tear down city walls, To found new countries of the heart, So our mild citizenry can learn riot And cultivate fields of wild flame.

KENNY NGUYEN was born and raised in South Vietnam. He earned a BFA in Fashion Design from Vietnam National University of Art and Architecture and was an assistant fashion designer in Ho Chi Minh City before moving to the US in 2010. He lives in Charlotte, NC, where he earned a BFA in painting at UNC Charlotte. His works have been exhibited at Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Katzen Arts Center at the American University, and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, among others. In 2016, Nguyen received an Excellence Award in the Asia Contemporary Young Artist Award exhibition from Sejong Museum of Art. He has been awarded artist residency fellowships, and he is the recipient of a 2019 Charlotte Regional Artist Project Grant and the 2019 Denis Diderot A-i-R Grant.