ONLINE FEATURE

List with some rivers in it

By Chiyuma Elliott     Of Rivers: A Chapbook

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In the dry season,
the rivers make themselves known.
The turn is a theory of composition,
say the rivers; the soul grows muddy and quiet
on its banks. The soul is an isthmus,
the rivers say; the left hand doesn’t know
what the right one is doing.
 
Be that as it may, the drought persists.
The orchards fold themselves in,
the magazines showcase bright drought-tolerants.
Signs blame along the highways:
the government, lawns, a general lack of faith.
The veins flow like aqueducts;
along the hedgerows, ofrendas.
 
I've known compression. I’ve known hillsides
charred black like obsidian,
the houses gaping open like mouths,
the future percussive,
everything pent with observation.
My soul has grown wide with wonder.
My soul has grown mesh and scales.




CHIYUMA ELLIOTT is the author of California Winter League. Her creative work has appeared in African American Review, Callaloo, The Collagist, Notre Dame Review, and PN Review, among others. She is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, visual culture, and intellectual history from the 1920s to the present. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Elliott was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing, and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. A Cave Canem Alumni Fellow, she has also received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

SELECTIONS FROM OF RIVERS APPEAR IN SHR VOL 49.3