~ Delta Poetry Review ~

- Featured Poet -

Julie Kane served as the 2011-2013 Louisiana Poet Laureate. Her most recent collection of poems, Mothers of Ireland (LSU Press, 2020), won the Poetry by the Sea Book Award and was longlisted for the Julie Suk Book Prize. Previous collections include Rhythm & Booze, winner of the National Poetry Series, and Jazz Funeral, winner of the Donald Justice Prize. With Grace Bauer, she co-edited Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and with Kiem Do, she co-authored Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer's War, which became a History Book Club featured alternate selection.

          Her poems appear in more than sixty anthologies including Best American Poetry and The Book of Irish American Poets from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. She has also published critical essays, book reviews, and translations and has collaborated with musical composers Libby Larsen, Kenneth Olson, and Dale Trumbore. Other honors for her work include a Shreveport Regional Arts Council Critic's Choice Literary Award, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Poetry Award. She has been the George Bennett Fellow in Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy, a Fulbright Scholar to Vilnius Pedagogical University in Lithuania, and a two-time New Orleans Writer in Residence at Tulane University. Having retired from Northwestern State University of Louisiana as an Emeritus Professor, she currently teaches in the low-residency poetry MFA program at Western Colorado University.

Snow-Globe
a song for Jay (1950-2019)

It was snowing on our first date to a New Year’s Eve party
but we never got out of his car
We just sat there in our snow-globe and kissed wearing mittens
while our friends asked, Who knows where they are?

In the beam of a streetlight, snow fell on the windshield
so lacey and silvery white
When we started to shiver he’d click on the heater
It was warm in our snow-globe that night

But of course we grew older, the world came between us
His daughter is twice our age then
Someone told me his heart stopped as he shoveled a sidewalk
I’ll never love winter again

Ode to Tinfoil

Surely such delicate metal, as thin
as hammered gold leaf, is worth a great deal
(though made of aluminum now, not tin,
and less in demand since the microwaved meal).

Crushed into “diamonds” and shaped into crowns,
its glitz once bedazzled me and my sisters.
Grandmother smoothed used sheets of it down
to stash in her kitchen, a poor woman’s silver.

Laugh if you will about tinfoil hats
keeping our thoughts from being known,
but what is more precious than that which wraps
food for a journey a long way from home?

Louisiana Indians Walking Along a Bayou

after the painting by Alfred L. Boisseau (1823-1901)

“God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ.” – “fact” in a history textbook approved for use in Louisiana voucher schools

Along a bayou draped with Spanish moss

They trudge along in silent single file,

Captured in paint before their world was lost,

Choctaw from their dress and basket style.

The artist witnessed them in forty-six,

The left-behinds. The thirties were the years

Insanity took hold of politics

And forced their tribesmen on the Trail of Tears.

Although these few and others made retreat

To swampy ground the slavers couldn’t farm,

The women’s heads are lowered in defeat.

What price, that rifle on their leader’s arm?

In days when we can’t trust the words in books,

Their plight is clear to anyone who looks.

Duplex: Ashes
Vixen (2006-2021)

I will not write a pandemic poem
before I can scatter my old dog’s ashes

Before I can scatter Vixen’s ashes
in places we used to go on walks

Now I have no excuse to walk
Nobody walks in Louisiana

Nobody voluntarily walks
unless it’s a gym with an indoor track

I don’t see the point of an indoor track
since walking the dog got me out of the house

The year I was sealed inside my house
like somebody buried alive in a tomb

Spring has arrived, I could leave this tomb
But Vix can’t follow except in poems