A Story Also Grows
poems by
Charlotte MuseISBN 13: 978-1-59948-175-3
~40 pages, $10
* * * Selected for publication as a result of finishing as a finalist in the
2008 MSR CHAPBOOK CONTEST * * *Projected release date: April 6, 2009
About the Author / Comments / Sample
About the Author
Charlotte Muse received both her M.A. and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she has taught Creative Writing and Poetry Writing. She also taught for some years as Instructor in Poetry for U.C. Berkeley Extension, for the Lifelines Project, and for many other organizations. She is the author of a chapbook, The Comfort Teacher (The Heyeck Press) and co-author of a poetry collection with Toni Mirosevich and Edward Smallfield of Trio (Specter Press).
Among other prizes, she has won the Yeats Society of New York's Poetry Award, a 2008 International Publication Award from the Atlanta Review, second place in the Joy Harjo Poetry Award (for a poem in this ms.), second prize in the 2008 Friends of Acadia Poetry Competition judged by Wesley McNair, and was a finalist for the New Letters Poetry Prize (also for several poems in this ms.) and for last year's Winning Writers War Poetry Contest.
These days she tutors Hispanic children in reading, teaches private workshops, and spends as much time as possible at the bottom of a nearby dry creek bed staring off into space.
Comments
Samples
ASCENCION DYING
She closed her eyes and began very gently picking imaginary flowers from
the blanket. Then, peacefully and without any struggle, she stopped
breathing. It was January 1930...--from "The Woman Who Remembered Paradise"
by Larry Engelmann, San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 1988
She is among bleached stones in a riverbed.
The river's a road narrowing at the horizon.
A wide sky, a wide plain, all the way to the mountains.
She is walking upstream, her shadow
lengthening behind her.
She is walking into the sun.She goes singing to herself,
her black dress merging with her shadow.
She is singing this place, that place,
how it was. She is singing a time
when music was the music of the tongue,
of gourd rattle, whistle, and drum,
of birdsong, water and the world.Into the mountains she climbs with the riverbed,
up to where the sky is a lake.
The voices of people she has longed for
hail her from a reed boat. She answers
in their lost language.
Before she goes to meet them
at the place where land falls away,
her fingers remember to pick flowers.
HOW TO MAKE ACORN SOUP
Bring every basket for the walk out to the trees after the first, bad acorns drop. The men will clear those wormy ones from the ground. After they've rattled down the good ones with sticks, gather them and spread them on rocks. Wave off birds and squirrels.
When they're dry, everyone must carry acorns back to the village, enough for a year, and store them in the granary with laurel against insects.
Now make the soup. Hull dry acorns. The skin is hard to remove. Winnow them until the nuts gleam bare. Pound them with stones. Pound longer, until you've made a fine flour.
Carry the flour to a stream in the morning, always looking for a sandy place. Make a leaching bed, spread your flour over it, and let the water run through all day. When evening comes, and the flour is rinsed and sweet, rake off the stones you've buried in the fire. Mix the acorn flour with water, two or three parts to one, and lower in the stones. When the soup is warm, it's ready.
Every day, pound acorns.
People are always hungry.
ON THE LAST NIGHT OF THE WORLD
The moon rose over the smoke of the dinner fire.
My mother had made thick soup.
Someone tipped hot rocks in to warm it
and the steam rose up.
If there was fresh meat,
I don't remember.I would like to remember.
My father hollowed out a stick for tobacco
and smoked it with the other men.
An owl hooted. Another answered.
The oaks on the far mountains darkened
and the stars came out.
The moon watched with a half-closed eye.The next morning, we saw the strangers
bobbing on the horizon
like children bouncing on a broken branch.
Yet they were coming fast towards us
as if each sat on a deer,
and the deer agreed to carry him.Closer they came, and closer,
until they stopped,
looking down on us from their strange animals
--not deer, not elk--
and spoke what we did not understand.
They handed us gifts, but their colored eyes
looked past us. We learned soon enough
they could kill anything.I have tried hard to remember that night
thinking I could bring it back,
but time, like a grey wolf,
will curl his dog shadow in among the trees
and only move when you turn your back.
He'll wait you out.
Until the day I felt his teeth and heard him howl,
I thought he was far off
hunting something else.