Girl with One Arm Down the Drain (erasure poem)
by Nance Van Winckel
Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Our Foreigner, winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Prize (Beyond Baroque Press, 2017) and Book of No Ledge (Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series, 2016). Of her five books of fiction, Ever Yrs, a scrapbook novel (Twisted Road Publications, 2014), is her most recent. The recipient of two NEA poetry fellowships, the Paterson Fiction Prize, a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes, Nance teaches in the MFA Programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Her author website is: http://www.nancevanwinckel.com; her visual poetry website is http://photoemsbynancevanwinckel.zenfolio.com
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “turnagain arm”? So I’m erasing myself. Who better to do such a job? I like this project of taking early poems and trying to upcycle them into something new, spare, and perhaps with an echo of 2018 rather than 1988. This one has some complicated issues for me in terms of such a revisitation: seeing now how I saw childhood then, thinking about my “adult coloring book” and a possible place in adulthood (come on, really!) for a page from there, and then the drain itself. Opening the drain. Let the drain drain, for pete’s sake.
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Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
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