Starting with the Emrys Journal in 1984, Emrys has provided in its publications a vital venue for writers. The Journal is well-known in the region for its staple of fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. Unpublished manuscripts from round the world are submitted to this annual book.
Poetry from the current issue
by Celisa Steele
in case of insomnia
Fluff and shift your pillow to the foot of the bed.
A change in perspective may be all that’s required.
If not, total the single digits – in your head –
of your birthday (month, day, year), add your address, your
phone numbers, work and home. Seek meaning in the sum.
Light the bedside lamp, read yesterday’s news, soon bored,
fling the paper down. Wander to the living room
to bask sofa-bound in the soft blue of muted
infomercials. Observe, out the window, the moon –
notice how for the first time you can remember
it seems a lozenge beginning to melt in a
sky-dark mouth. Now leave your house to walk unslippered
and nightgowned down the gravel drive. Even if you
are not Inuit, construct an inukshuk of
rocks scavenged beneath neighbors’ darkened windows to
mark the way. Sweating and shivering, turn inside.
Pass a baby’s room. Open the door and enter.
Silent, watch his tenuous chest, the subtle tide
of breath. And doubt that, as sirens scream through streets,
children sleep insensible on their rumpled sheets.
The poet Celisa Steele lives in Carrboro, North Carolina. Her first book of poems, How Language Is Lost, is the twelveth publication from Emrys Press in its selective chapbook and poetry series, which began in 1995.
Ron Rash describes Celisa as “one of the Carolinas’ finest poets,” and Janice Moore Fuller calls her “a nimble metalinguist.” Anthony S. Abbott finds in How Language Is Lost “a delightful play of language, a sheer joy at how language is not lost, how language can take any experience and transform it into passion, into humor, into fresh and unusual insights into the seemingly ordinary experiences of life.”