Lily Watch. Poems by Lisa Hammond, selected by Ron Mohring as Number Four in Volume Nine of our Summer Kitchen Chapbook Series.
Release date: November 30, 2021 [49 copies]
25 pages
$ 9.00
Cover image: vintage indigo quilting cotton, collection of Ron Mohring.
Lisa Hammond is the author of two previous chapbooks, Goddess Suite (Small Fires Press, 2018) and Moving House (Texas Review Press, 2007), which won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Calyx, Birmingham Poetry Review, The South Carolina Review, English Journal, storySouth, North Carolina Literary Review, and Literary Mama, among others. She is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina Lancaster.
To learn more about her work, please visit lisaghammond.com or her Goodreads page.
from Purple Martins, Bomb Island
This island knows before and after, remembers
how World War II pilots swooped down, skip bombing
practice runs over that thin slip of South Carolina,
Lake Murray’s dark waters growing darker with silt
as the red clay shore crumbled. I swam in this lake
as a girl, digging my toes in the sandy bottom,
afraid of the tiny biting fish, before I knew anything
of history or had one myself. A whole life since then. Two.
Now my daughter does her sunscreen and mine too,
tries to keep her brother from unravelling the bowline.
My new husband hands me into the boat, steadying
me when it rocks, and the long July afternoon stretches
like the wake behind as we watch the depth finder
draw the lake floor, bream and striped bass etched
in silent schools . . .
Our thanks to Tar River Poetry for first publishing this poem.
Limited edition: only 24 copies available. Order yours here!
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Seven Kitchens Press 