Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, forthcoming 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry), and three chapbooks. Her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, Consequence, Southern Indiana Review, At Length, Plume, and elsewhere. She is a past recipient of the NEPC’s E. E. Cummings award, and her first chapbook, Mirror Factory, also received an honorable mention for the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. A 2023-2024 Artist in Residence at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Carolyn lives with her family in Worcester. Her website is carolynoliver.net.
Selections from Dearling, Honorable Mention, Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize
My Son is a Quantum Particle Why do women like to clean their sons’ faces with their spit? he asks. He leans kitchenwise trying to smell the lentils simmering, last of winter, while I de-mustard his cheek. Yesterday, when he was shorter, he told me a horse trampled Pierre Curie’s skull, just an accident, but Marie Curie was crushed. I picture a foal, reach for deer or lions, something about birth or safety but he’s in motion, his stride a gallop— I want to call after him, I want to lie or tell only part of the truth. Because you won’t wait for the water to run hot, for me to find a cloth. Never mind my own rush, or that this fleeting intimacy makes me feel like a mother to a smaller child. I realize the swipe of my thumb is just proximity’s blow against uncertainty, deflected: only his position’s detectable, not his momentum, how swiftly and at what angle he’s racing away from the table, blazing away from me. But if some stealthy power gave me to know his speed I might miss his limbs spilling over the bed, still in sleep as snow mothering a dirt road hollowed of hoofbeats—yes, that knowing would stalk me. So I don’t answer, don’t speak. I let him go. My own half-life spins, unseen. On a school morning in mid-October I called my friend who lives in the mountains and while we talked I paced by the window, my attention caught not by the two pines, their branches pitched high to block any glimpse beyond the cottage whose red door’s been shut since the owner died some months ago—no, I couldn’t see past the mauve hydrangeas because a man stood there pointing a gun, a long gun aimed into the muted blooms. Between us cruisers and blue trucks swarmed, closed the state highway, spilled out more men, laughing. For a long time nothing happened but the rain. The armed man disappeared, the others too. The red door held back a secret. The storm covered its tracks. And the men returned, hunched, no guns, just tarp in their hands, hauling six hundred pounds of still and silent moose toward the waiting pickup wedged in the gap of the neat stone wall. They heaved, heaved, and in she slid. Snug against the tailgate, her head was bound muzzle to ear in hunter’s orange to stop a bite or send a sign, unclear. From our fences the motorcade snaked west for woods: a place to wake—joy!—the moose. I was telling her, my beautiful friend who lives where the big pines graze thinner air, I was telling her fear is part of it that sweetness siphons off its weight, sweetness that wakes us early on the last golden maple morning before the wind arrives— or I tried to tell her, but found my throat, just then, couldn’t lift the right words out. Horses in the Mist I would like this to be a poem about rising early on an Adirondack morning after an ice storm, counting ghost apples he could melt with a graze of his small fiery fingers as we follow a split-rail fence to a pasture where foals and mares, their largeness daunting, flare their breath into the mist. In this poem I would be the kind of woman who carries sugar cubes in her pocket, whose son becomes, as the haze dissolves, a little less afraid. But I have never risen in the Adirondacks and it is not morning. There was no ice storm last night, just a phone call, so I am counting all the ways boys know how to make ghosts as I follow the road to school alone. I am the kind of woman who carries her son’s health insurance card in her pocket. There are still horses in the mist, he could touch them if the classroom windows dissolved. On their backs sway men with guns so he won’t be afraid.
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