Among other journals and anthologies, Pris Campbell's poetry has appeared in Chiron Review, Boxcar Poetry Review, MiPo (print and digital), Wild Goose Review, The Smoking Poet, The Cliffs: Soundings, and and The Dead Mule: An Anthology of Southern Literature. She was featured poet in Empowerment4Women and In The Fray in 2008 and From East to West in 2009. . Her third chapbook, Hesitant Commitments, was recently released as part of Lummox Press' Little Red Book series.It can be ordered at www.lummoxpress.com. She will also be included in Best of the Little Red Books by Lummox and in Best of Boxcar Poetry Review this year, 2009. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2008. More of her poetry can be found on her website: http://www.poeticinspire.com . She was born and raised in South Carolina and has lived in the midwest, Hawaii, Providence and Boston. Currently, she lives in the greater West Palm Beach, FL with her husband. A former Clinical Psychologist, she's been sidelined by CFIDS since 1990.
Night Moon
If I throw up I will die if I throw up I will die If
I...
The words streak through Sara's head.
She presses her lips tight until the nausea passes.
Trying to overcome this inexplicable fear,
she bends, a broken tree, over porcelain,
legs quaking, hands forming a plea.
When she finally remembers him clearly,
she weeps: his old man's flesh
forced into her 8 year old mouth,
back pressed hard
against the narrow bed, springs creaking,
as he jerked his stench into her.
If I throw up I will die if I throw up I will...
She grieves for the child she forgot,
had to forget, but now
can no longer forget, nights
when her stomach churns
and the moon buries itself deep
into the innocent sky.
Unsettling Changes
Sara thinks she's met someone.
He never stayed out all night dancing,
never painted roses on city walls,
doesn't write steamy poetry,
or wear jeans with holes in the knees,
patches stitched up and down.
He brings her broth when she's ill,
opens doors, touches her as he passes.
His hands are careful, eyes soft.
Ten years ago she would've found him boring.
Ten years ago she wasn't a mom.
He takes the boy to the zoo, movies,
baseball games, wants to marry Sara
adopt the boy. After all, Norman
hasn't been seen in years.
Sara doesn't know how that works.
She would have to face Norman.
Would her pulse race?
Would she want him again?
The boy's still Norman's son,
still that piece of Norman she wraps
her heart around like a pearl.
With the boy adopted, Norman may fade.
That part of her heart may collapse inward.
Relentless
No love deserves such punishment.
Our marriage grows into an aging buffalo,
meat blown dry by the chilled northern winds
and picked clean by small skittering birds
until the very heart of it is gone.
Its bones scatter and tumble, some to be
carried off by laughing wolves
or displayed in a museum at Graceland
for future lovers to frown upon,
scoff,
'that'll not be us'. They're unable to see
the winds already building like a tornado
to their north. They can't fathom they need
shelter from that relentless moon,
already spinning its Pole dance in anticipation
of killing hunts yet to come.
Song of the Wadi Hitan
Prone on the hot white sands
of the Wadi Hitan,
I slide my arms up and down
making angel wings.
The dust storm still looms,
a huge powder puff on the horizon.
Soon it will sweep past me to Cairo,
that jeweled lady sprawled by the fickle Nile.
Men and women will cover their faces.
Cats will hide beneath buildings.
Windows will take weeks of polishing
to come clean.
Deep in the sands beneath me, a whale cries.
His fleshhas melted, teeth scattered
like broken pearls. His last meal
of fresh shark meat has long been digested.
He laments the loss of his ocean
and friends to hunt with when nights are cool.
Unlike the Pharaohs, Cleopatra,and the Great Pyramids,
he was forgotten, he tells me.
I can't sing whalespeak, can't tell
him he wasn't forgotten, can't ask
what song he sang so many years ago
that pierced thick sand and inspired
turbaned men resting here at this spot
on camel-back to name this place Wadi Hitan-
Valley of Whales.
Instead, I scheherazade him images
of high tumbling waves, fat sharks waiting
to be eaten, giant squid drifting under
moonless nights good for hunting,
whales swimming free.
He sighs. The desert sleeps.
Note: Wadi Hitan, which means "Valley of Whales," teemed with sea-animals, undiscovered until approximately 14,000 years after this part of the desert was given this name. The University of Michigan article on this latest find reported that the Wadi Hitan "included five species of whales, presently exhibited in the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum.