Second Place

Stacey Lynn Brown

Edwardsville, IL

Stacey Lynn Brown was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and studied at Emory University, Oxford University, and The University of Oregon, where she received her MFA.  Her book-length poem, Cradle Song, won the 2007 Cider Press Review Book Award and will be published in January, 2009.  She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University Edwarsdville, where she lives with her husband and daughter.

E. Ethelbert Miller’s comments:

“One discovers a sense of place in this poet’s work. Faith’s importance is conveyed in these poems. Even the flies are buzzing in some of the lines. One can’t forget the south. I kept returning to the prose poem XXVII and thinking about family and how we grow old.”

Stacey Lynn Brown

From Cradle Song

I.

When I was four, we drove to Nashville,

Grand Ole Opry-bound, and stopped

the night at a broken down motel

in Tennessee—shag walls,

mossy carpet, dank concrete—

and I remember standing in

the doorway as evening fell,

a busful of believers rattling their way

to the pool for a makeshift

baptism, the Amens and Hear us, Lords

ricocheting through the courtyard

as underwater lights glowed

the pool algae green.

They could come to him, the big

preacher man, and he’d lay

a palm across their foreheads, brace

them at the small of their backs.

They’d release themselves to him:

teethsucking the air before

falling back into salvation,

held under unstruggling and

splashing up anew all gasping

grace and sanctified glory

hallelujah til my mother shut the door

and made me watch tv.

My parents don’t recall it,

but that’s the way

memory works in the South—

the truth is always lying

in some field somewhere between

the bones of the fallen

and the weapons they reach for.

II.

Down South, all it takes

to be a church are some stencils

and a van. And my childhood

was full of them:

The Episcopal litanies of Sunday school

exercises in genuflection,

the low country Southern Baptist pit

of hellfire and damnation

hemming us inside the tent

while just outside,

flies hoverbuzzed above

plattered chicken, slaw, and beans.

Prophets profiteering in spoken

tongues as the Charismatic

wailed and thrashed and shook

their Babel babble down.

In dirt-floored shacks, fevered

believers danced themselves

into a frenzy, coiling snakes like copper

bracelets dangling from their wrists,

spit-cracked lips and boot heel clog,

the bass line itself almost enough

to give you back your faith.

Grape juice in Dixie

cups, cardboard host, backwashed

wine, this grit who’d been told

to be still and learn

was never any closer to God

than when I stood at the back of that

whitewashed clapboard A.M.E. I could only

ever visit: The preacher pacing the worn

strip of rug, pleading, Help us, Lord,

teach us how to love,

sending testified ripples that washed

over heads nodding bobs

on the waves of his words:

choir rocking, feet stomping, peace

only to be found in the swing skirt of shimmy

and the big-bellied voices booming it holy

in the gospel of move and know sway.