Sheila Carter-Jones | Elegy-ish

Elegy-ish: poems by Sheila Carter-Jones. Number Three in our Allison Joseph Chapbook Series.

[ cover art by Sheila Squillante ]

Publication:  October 11, 2024 [100 copies]
33 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-20-4
$ 12.00

Sheila L. Carter-Jones is the author of Three Birds Deep, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Book Award, and Every Hard Sweetness (BOA Editions). Her chapbook Crooked Star Dream Book was named Honorable Mention for the New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Contest. She is a fellow of Cave Canem and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and a Walter Dakin Fellow of the Sewanee Writer’s Conference. She was born and raised in a small coal mining town in Western Pennsylvania, which is the site of many of her poems. Her poetry has been published in various journals, anthologies and newspapers. Sheila received her MFA from Carlow University, where she currently teaches in their Madwomen in the Attic Program.

My Brother on Earth

He was the quiet one. The left-handed one. But
that’s not how I knew he was going to be the first
one. It wasn’t that nearly every summer he stepped
on a rotted piece of board and got a rusty nail stuck
in his foot. Or, when he was setting a rabbit trap in
the backyard garden and almost got a finger snapped
off testing how fast the metal trigger could spring
and make a quick catch. Sometimes, he cried, but
not all the way. Tears at the rims of his eyelids were
just enough to let me feel what he held inside. I
thought he was brave not to show all the hurt. Seeing
one tear stream over his cheek and to his chin when
he came home after two tours in the Vietnam War is
when I knew. I could feel how much he ached. I
knew he couldn’t hold it all. And, I didn’t know for
how long. Only that he was going to be first. There
was a keloid of flesh on his inner left forearm shaped
like a sun. A proliferation of scar tissue shot out as
blistery rays where he had been wounded. Smooth.
Tender. It marked him like words on a headstone.
The air around him was different. Thinner. Harder to
breathe in. It didn’t have the fresh feel of low mist on
bare legs as we hiked over scattered leaves and pine
needles in the woods after a storm. Or, the faint
shimmer of purple rising from violets he pulled from
damp soil and ate handfuls, even as tiny clumps of
dirt clung to the roots. I knew him best when he
laughed with a mouthful of wild flowers.

[ our thanks to South Dakota Review for first publishing this poem ]
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