10th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Kristy Odelius -- Honorable Mention

Odelius is a poet of commendable charm and insouciance. In her passionate whimsy she invokes influences from Wallace Stevens to the Robert Desnos praised by her "Virgins of Chicago," marvelous creatures who "who work nights at Federal/Screw Products." Deft, dry-witted, fabulistic and musical, these are poems to be savored.
-- Campbell McGrath

Kristy Odelius teaches creative writing and literature at North Park University, where she will be joining the English department faculty full-time this fall. She is a co-editor and co-founder of Near South, a Chicago-based journal of innovative writing. Last November, her poem "Vertigo to Eros" was nominated for a 2003 Pushcart Prize, and she recently received the 2004 Charles Goodnow Memorial Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in a variety of journals, including Chicago Review, ACM, and Diagram and she has just completed her first book length manuscript of poems titled Strange Trades.

If we'd met in the swamp, it would've been different

Our black eyes transparent, our home base a high
bat's nest stuffed in the chest of an arthritic cypress

named for a one-eyed chief, and several of his
descendents. Flowering water is the muck

of our breakfasts. We ease ourselves, we slip
into a sweet, a mosquito bath drawn from waters

we don't dare drain. Oh man, I don't like
the sound of that thunder. Gator jaws

are beautiful, like a gum-tree raft.
What is "natural"? What is "good" in a forest,

tucked under water? Cypress knees rise up from nowhere,
on fire, the light making coals of a root's reflection.

What is all this nonsense? We have swamps
on our conscience, like a lie that returns to

the edge of our dreams, laughing much louder
than our swimming fists. We are caught in a swamp

storm, out on the boardwalk, the sky falls toward
us with each cracking branch. The cypress have

lived here so long in this silent buzz, they talk
of our dumb luck, they make us feel good,

as if we were already the past.

© 2004 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.