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TUSCARORA REVIEW 2016
2016 TUSCARORA REVIEW
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A Sonnet for Lil
John Hovde
My love loves turning her fertile dirt
with fingernails broken and blackened by soil.
She frames discomfort in a worn skirt,
Her posture shaped by passionate toil.
My dissolute song at our wedding bower,
like a mockingbird’s drunken excuses sung;
a honeybee intoxicated on the barley flower,
shadows her with frosty tongue.
Short days, short tempers and Winter strife,
my shamefaced reticence provokes only silence.
Come the advent of Spring and a rush to life, then
aphids and potato bugs incite her to violence.
She destroys and grows with the exuberance of living;
My transgressions forgotten, she is Gaia forgiving.
Passing Storm
John Hovde
After the death of love there is
a heaviness in the heart, an interment of life.
Accumulating weight of loss and despair
Strikes the chest like clods, smothering joy
And darkening tomorrow’s promise.
After the storm, feculent heaviness oppresses the air.
Birdsong is a hollow requiem
chanted through the wet canopy of
a chapel frescoed with decomposing pastels of spring.
The storm has gone and peace reigns.
Breathing is autonomic; the familiar odor of worms flavors the air.
Elizabeth
Robley,
Untitled
Painting
Felicity Alvino,
Untitled
— Photography