Wilmington

Anna B. Sutton
Published on April 9, 2020

If you could forgive the palmetto bugs
blanketing the slick rocks under the dock, the dog 
shit left to shrivel on the salt-washed wood, a man

emerging from below, mud-stained to his shoulders,
his cage of crawfish and a look up your skirt, limp 
body breaking at the end of the slips, face bloated 

and mercifully turned to the reeds, the Riverwalk 
could be lovely—if you could keep your eyes 
on the current, the clever lilt of little whitecaps 

that belied the rush, the dip and tuck of birds 
on its surface—in Tennessee, you knew the Cumberland, 
Mississippi, muddy hunger widening with every rain,

but the Cape Fear is a filament, a wick, Atlantic finger 
digging a road into or out of Carolina.

Genre: 
Poetry
Author Bio: 

Anna B. Sutton's work has appeared in Indiana Review, Third Coast, Copper Nickel, Booth, Los Angeles Review, and other journals. She received her MFA from University of North Carolina Wilmington and a James Merrill fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. She was a co-founder of the Porch Writers' Collective and has worked for numerous literary organizations, including Humanities Tennessee, Lookout Books, Blair Publisher, Gigantic Sequins, One Pause Poetry, Dialogist, and Ecotone. Her debut collection, Savage Flower, won the St. Lawrence First Book Prize and will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2021.

Issue: 
62