The Meeting Place

Joseph-Beth Booksellers SouthPark

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Winners of Anthony Abbott Poetry Contest

Photos and Read Poetry from May 1st CWC North Meeting

How to Rob

Remember when we stole Rock’n’Roll from blacks?
Bill Haley must roll in his grave everyday
He hears my headphones blare hip-hop tracks,

But I have to, since the Beatles don’t help me relax,
And whether we took it or you gave it away
I feel guilty for stealing Rock’n’Roll from blacks,

Guilt because we built this country on your backs.
I need forgiveness, but I don’t want to pray,
So I press replay and blare hip-hop tracks

And I’ll change the dial to a station that lacks
Guitars, pretend I’m into what the rappers say
And wish we never stole Rock’n’Roll from blacks.

Now I, a white guy, can hear the attacks
As lyricists insist my people stand in their way.
I try not to stare if blacks blare hip-hop tracks.

From speakers too loud, too deep for your Cadillacs.
I’m not stereotyping, I just see it, okay?
My people stole Rock’n’Roll from blacks:
Now I lack the soul to ever know hip-hop tracks.

Graham Younger
Davidson College
Davidson, NC 28035-5446

July

--poem using a line from John Ashbury

Sky rockets are good—do they still exist?
Once it got dark we’d tramp out to the field
through tall grass filled with mouthy monsters
and mosquitoes.

We’d pay itchy, red welts and sticker-grass splinters—
the price for bare feet in southern summer after sundown.
It was worth the scratching and squirming
to put stars in the sky for a cheap dollar-fifty,
treasures bought in a tent on the far side of town.

Big kids had rockets,
small kids had sparklers,
and we’d make a rainbow galaxy all on our own.

‘Till we were caught out of bed,
who owned the world
and the sky…

Claire McElvaney
Meredith College

Lauren Brown
Queens University of Charlotte

Attn: Mr. Walt Disney

Hey – old man.

I want a mirror that is not enchanted
with your notion of beauty –
lips plump with plastic compliance,
empty eyes unable to tell a real man
from animated perfection.

I want a man who does not hide
behind a white horse and kisses
to happily fabricate ever after.

I want a glass coffin in which I can hide
from the angel in the house and the complacent
tunes she whistles in time with the swish
swish of her broom’s bristles, as she swears
that her shoes fit my feet – only
my feet, perfectly.

There are little girls who want
to sing my songs, but I want them to sing
songs that are not contrived
by the fancy you created when you sketched
my face, snowy white, and flawless.

But mostly, mister, I want
a mirror that shows silver curls taking over
once golden locks, and lines etched
by wisdom and carved by age around my lips
that are not ruby red, but still glow
with the new song I will sing
when this enchantment breaks.

Time Travel, or Today is my Past-Life’s Yesterday

How many times before
have I been nineteen, skin taut on bones
just this side of adolescence.

When you knew me first I slapped queens,
flirted with the guillotine while you
vomited into your top hat.

I chased taxis in a trenchcoat
and painted watercolors in Hyde Park
where you dropped acid,
the same white-hot disc of sun
burning both your shoulders, the bridge of my nose.

Once your fingers found heat,
an adventure in the core of me, our only witness
a robin’s egg, a patch of brown grass.

The dark splits open and we
topple inside, night sprung from
friction-bodies in shadows of thin trees.
Still I kiss you, and still I think
this might be tomorrow,
or we might already be gone.

Kali McCullough
Catawba College

When Meeting Your Ghost

How a day might fall from the edge
clinging like an orange peel
to the lip of a rattan wastebasket,
you pass in the corridor.
All dust settles
mid-flight
and a dormouse keeps to the wall,
pressing
the border of nightmares.

When letting you touch
so close
you could not define those
smallest of bones,
how the bareness is threatening
subtle
without the forgiveness of
translucence,
sometimes puckering
and soft,
entering a permanence

like your name in a window
distorting glass,
we can no longer pronounce it
a beveled vowel
wet from sucking.

Lauren A. Smith
Catawba College

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