SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW
  • HOME
    • EVENTS
    • Pushcart Prize Nominees
    • RESULTS: Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York 2022
    • RESULTS: Editors Chapbook Prize for Fiction 2021
  • CURRENT ISSUE
    • ONLINE FEATURES
    • REVIEWS
    • STORE
  • ARCHIVES
    • The 1960s
    • The 2010s
    • The 2020s
  • SUBMISSIONS
    • Submit
    • Auburn Witness Poetry Prize
  • ABOUT
  • HOME
    • EVENTS
    • Pushcart Prize Nominees
    • RESULTS: Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York 2022
    • RESULTS: Editors Chapbook Prize for Fiction 2021
  • CURRENT ISSUE
    • ONLINE FEATURES
    • REVIEWS
    • STORE
  • ARCHIVES
    • The 1960s
    • The 2010s
    • The 2020s
  • SUBMISSIONS
    • Submit
    • Auburn Witness Poetry Prize
  • ABOUT
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

ONLINE FEATURE

______ and the Elders

By Janet McAdams

Alabama Poets



Vertical Divider
​Sharp as a murder of dried-up crows
they caw the day’s hoarse choices:
 
Yield to us or else we’ll say
you yielded— 
 
All their dark angles ready to pierce
the luminous fruit of her, tell me
 
who wouldn’t want to mouth
that ample breast or tongue
 
the flushed aureole surrounding
the one uncovered rose-colored nipple
 
ungazed
and perfect in the moment just before— 
 
not unlike the glass of wine
set before me this Wednesday evening and me
 
among the lookers. She—say we— 
are the ones who live to tell our other story:
 
for years, I yes’d and no’d. Beautiful
Susannah, tell me how you loved
 
the stones, the mob,
their terrible deaths. 


JANET MCADAMS is the author of the chapbook Seven Boxes for the Country After (Kent State, 2016), the novel Red Weather (Arizona, 2012), and two collections of poetry, Feral (Salt, 2007) and The Island of Lost Luggage (Arizona, 2000), which won the American Book Award. A native of Tuscaloosa, she now teaches at Kenyon College, where she is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry and an Editor at Large for the Kenyon Review.


Picture
Picture
MORE FROM THIS FEATURE:


“A Poem About the Body”
By ASHLEY JONES


“Bestiary of Bad Kisses”
By ASHLEY JONES


“Salt Epistemologies”
By JANET MCADAMS

“_____ and the Elders”
By JANET MCADAMS


“My Great-great-great-great Grandfather Was a Railroad Man Who Owned my Great-great-great-great Grandmother and Shares My Birthday”
By JASON MCCALL

“The Night I Turned Down a Tuscaloosa Threesome Because I Know My Worth”
By JASON MCCALL


CURRENT ISSUE
SUBMIT
EVENTS
ARCHIVES
STORE

Vertical Divider

CONTACT
SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW
9088 HALEY CENTER
AUBURN UNIVERSITY
AUBURN, AL 36849

shr@auburn.edu
334.844.9088

Vertical Divider
Official trademark of Auburn University

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS