Dive
by Alice Pettway
A friend
told me, life
can rush
at you faster
than metaphor,
faster
than the water
sea birds
break, diving
retina to wave,
until their eyes
scratch
too deeply to
hunt. They starve.
Alice Pettway’s work has appeared in print and online journals, magazines and newspapers including The Bitter Oleander, INSIGHT Into Diversity, The Miami Herald, The Progressive, Teaching Tolerance and WomenArts Quarterly. Her chapbook, Barbed Wire and Bedclothes was published by Spire Press in 2009, and her full-length collection, The Time of Hunger | O Tempo de Chuva, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in 2017. Pettway is a former Lily Peter fellow, Raymond L. Barnes Poetry Award winner, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Currently, she lives and writes in Bogotá, Colombia. alicepettway.com
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Dive”? I tend to write my poems last line up. “Dive” was no exception. The last couple of lines came to me as I watched blue-footed boobies plunging into the water along the cliffs of the Galapagos islands. Their descent—graceful and violent and ultimately fatal—was too good of a metaphor to pass up.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again March 15, 2023. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/09 • Rae Gourmand
09/16 • Chiwenite Onyekwelu
09/23 • TBD
09/30 • TBD