Aristotle’s Lantern. Poems by Sierra Golden, selected by Ron Mohring and Eduardo C. Corral as Number Four in the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series.

Publication:  March 21, 2017 [100 copies]
Second printing: August, 2017
$ 9.00

Cover: “Love Has a Tide,” by Chelsea Stephen; adapted by the artist as cover design. www.leftpebble.com

Sierra Golden received her MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University. Winner of the program’s 2012 Academy of American Poets Prize, Golden’s work appears in literary journals such as Prairie Schooner, Permafrost, and Ploughshares. She has also been awarded residencies by Hedgebrook, the Island Institute, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Although she calls Washington State home, Golden has spent many summers in Alaska, working as a commercial fisherman. She was a 2015-2016 Made at Hugo House Fellow and now works in communications at Casa Latina, a nonprofit empowering Latino immigrants through employment, education, and community organizing.

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Town Day

In Pelican, they say the dump, a mile outside of town,
is the only place with cell service.

And so he clomps off the boat
and off the float, up the ramp,
away from town, hot showers,
a fresh bag of flour, and stamps

for stacks of love notes he wrote
on watch ignoring the whales.
He turns left at the King hung
from a ladder’s rung, gills veiled

with blood, and puddled guts saved
for the dogs baying under
the boardwalk. Quick sounds of town
give out to the woods and dump.

There’s no silence. It’s all breeze,
spruce trees whiskering his ears,
and eldritch calls–ravens
scavenging bones and beer cans.

Today’s the day he finally
gets to call his one sweetheart.
All that time fishing, nothing
but Skipper’s grunts cut the hard

face of solitude. Ten days
waiting for invisible
waves to carry his tin voice
across vast land, across dull, 

plain houses huddled in clumps,
and into cold plastic pressed
to the precious ear his tongue
loves to enter, caressing

calyx-whorls of cartilage
and tender folds of pink flesh,
and so all day at the dump
he dials and dials his best half,

fingers moving like pretty
please, like knock on wood, like long
prayers, like rain dancers bright
in his loneliness who stomp

for a connection that comes
on just the right wind above
the tattered trash. It does what
it can to keep them in love.

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• Purchase Sierra’s chapbook here.
• Sierra is interviewed about Aristotle’s Lantern here at Speaking of Marvels
• Sierra’s chapbook has gone into a second print run. Thanks to everyone who has supported this title.
• Order Sierra’s full-length collection, The Slow Art, from Small Press Distribution!