10th Annual Juried Reading: Lorraine Harrell

10th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Lorraine Harrell

Lorraine Harrell is a poet, writer, playwright, and essayist. She is the recipient of the McDonald's Literary Achievement Award- national winner in poetry, an Illinois Arts Council grant, and a Mary Roberts Rinehart grant. She is a former Chicago Tribune writer for Tempo Woman. A winner in the Warner Bros., Lorimar TV Comedy Writer's Workshop, and selected for the Los Angeles Theater Center Wordsmith playwriting competition/workshop. Harrell has written six stage plays: Wishing Well, A Magician's Heart, In My Mother's House, The Halloween Party, Women Hold Up Half the Sky, and Redefining Skyhaven. Ms. Harrell received her MFA in playwriting from the University of Southern California.

The First Sky is Inside You

Lorraine Hansberry completing the first draft of A Raisin in the Sun, New York, winter 1957

The last page mounted free of trees
Flowered eyed, gazes like a lighthouse
across the lengthening sea.

A woman lies on the living floor, stretched out
face down, as if a child digging to China
or a starfish saluting the ocean

an organic plant-
winter night heat stripped
hundreds of tiny fibers

indistinct, boundless gristle of loam.
Guided by the leafless mixture
swimming through every branch of her limbs

in her head, all those worlds of words
percolating through her pores, delivering
to her this one-hundred page plank of flesh

spirit and form. A form rich and strange as
an island-spreads her before an altar
separated and whole, she can taste the floor
vibrate, bicycling her back into place

piece by piece she fuses-the head swims
to shore, the arms remember its wings.
The legs uncurl landing here-the almost

finish line. She hasn't washed in days,
nights are Alaska, the typewriter is a pool
of hungry chicks subdividing into one long

unending march. Days, months, relentless
hours of blood dripping from finger to paper
sheer reckless driving till sunup

wandering barren in a ditch, tripping onto ground
climbing the hill, yes-slumps of sand dunes coagulating
before doubling back down again. The plowing under

the vast dust bowl. Seeds ripped-planting over and over again.
O the specifics of getting there, dissecting each paltry utterance,
listening with an ear so open the cavern is rubbed bare.

The skeleton fingers of creativity slip and stick or
not move at all. She tells herself summer is coming.
and it does. A hot spell sprays through the ice

centuries of winters stands still-a blossom
has opened its heart, chamber by chamber she walks
through the thicket of doors, the blue

of twilight greets her
a soft window has opened-
the drought surpassed for now

Come in, while the snow melts the sky.