~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Featured Poet • Jeffrey Alfier

Jeffrey Alfier is 2018 winner of the Angela Consolo Manckiewick Poetry Prize, from Lummox Press. In 2014 he won the Kithara Book Prize, judged by Dennis Maloney. He was a finalist for the Missouri Laureate Prize in 2021. Publication credits include Arkansas Review, Atlanta Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Columbia College Literary Review, Copper Nickel, Emerson Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kestrel, Gargoyle, Hotel Amerika, Los Angeles Review, Louisville Review, The Midwest Quarterly, New York Quarterly, Permafrost, Penn Review, Poetry Ireland Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southwestern American Literature, and Texas Review.

His latest collection of poems is The Shadow Field (Louisiana Literature Journal & Press, 2020). He is also author of Gone This Long: Southern Poems, The Wolf Yearling, Idyll for a Vanishing River, Fugue for a Desert Mountain, Anthem for Pacific Avenue: California Poems, Southbound Express to Bayhead: New Jersey Poems, The Red Stag at Carrbridge: Scotland Poems, Bleak Music: A Photo and poetry collaboration with poet Larry D. Thomas. He is a member of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Overwintering

We met on the AMTRAK out of Cut Bank
and rode toward the gaining dusk of Fargo.

She stared out her window with the trance
of a mother lacing the boots of her child.

From the Fargo platform I watched her drift down
an empty street of neon sparking tavern doorways,

homeward perhaps, out by the Red River
whose surface now shimmers with snow

swept up by highbeams in a gust of light.

Winter Sea

I was wrong about vanishing back then. In dawns
cold as today’s, we wandered this strand north of False Cape,

gulls treading miles of daylight above us, heady days
before we’d ever dream our love would fray apart.

Last night, heavy rain rebodied footprints
inscribed under a now vacant sun.

Fresh fog gives the coast the texture of medieval paintings.
Sea oats beckon me over the dunes in a landward wind

brackish with salt, the tired slats of the boardwalk
bending beneath my steps. Driftwood crumbles

under me like memories this ocean never wanted.
I watch fishermen climb the aggregate stone of a breakwater,

casting long poles as if witching salt from the sea.
An indistinct figure’s stare toward the horizon

says they suffer the phantom pain of an unredeemed life.
My eyes follow a woman in a wetsuit taking to the surf

as if it were decidedly her realm and hers alone.
A cormorant takes a sharp turn, dives for the shallows.

Someone waves from the dim sketch of an outbound ship,
their farewell still crossing the sea.

Feral Intelligence in a Mojave Desert Town

Love, each morning I leave you still asleep
in my high school jersey I never started
a single game in, my cash in a money belt
no one else wears these days, and at some crossroad
along the town limits, I fake surveyor work,
busk with your pawn shop guitar,
or scoop broth and cabbage for the rescue mission.
But at each job I’m dismissed early or quit,
relieved to return to our room and its scent
of pencil-wood and damp coats,
slide back under our bedding, as we laugh
as I slip the jersey up over your breasts
and we fancy ourselves camping at Yellowstone
— burrowed under some giant Douglas fir,
or we’ve train-hopped the bellowing Union Pacific
that boresights the desert outside,
or pretend we’re the streetlight flexing its luminance
over the emptiness of our darkening window.

Chesapeake Bay August

I claim warm Virginia breezes as my true balm.
Footsteps inhabit windrows of sand, the shoreline
voluptuous with sunlight and the bright haze of spindrift.
To the relief of all, the lazy grace of rainshowers
stand off in the distance drawing their borders
on the surface of the tide. Ardent swimmers undulate —
breaststrokes, flips, and butterflies.
Shorebird calls are so distant and faint
they sound estranged from the sea.
Seaweed lies winnowed from the surf,
strewn like frayed garments of castaways.
Wildflowers run indigent among sea oats —
goldenrod, horsenettle — always something with thorns.
The stone grace of a breakwater grants solace
to vessels underway, to trawlermen weathered hard
like posters of the missing.
Quitting the shore in the late light,
my eyes follow a woman holding seashells
collected in a scarf that once hid her hair
She ascends the steps to her beachside cottage,
her shadow climbing the door
to the small room that means so much.

Appointment in Pottawatomie County

Summer’s handed the year its last warm evening.
I drove the hinterland, reached in little time the autumn

fields that edge the town of Shawnee.
Under a web of contrails, a farmer grinds a stubblefield to dust.

This year the maples shed early, parsing russet tones
among deeper greens and the hunger-calls of crows.

Wind drags birds and brushfire smoke across my vision.
Ditches that line the fields are stitched to thorns.

Children pick through the small miracle
of blackberries. An aged couple

inured to the year’s turning, sit in shallow light
under sweetgum and red oak that thinly shade

the deepscreen porch behind them. Wildflower holdouts
spin beneath the hooves of horses lathered in the cool air.

Footpaths curve blindly through bracken,
the sweet decay of overstory.

Sideroads cut so obliquely off the highway
they must have a need to lose themselves in unsaid secrets.

At the town’s only diner, my waitress took her tip
without a word, her kindness having gone off the air.

Across the North Canadian River from here, a strip club’s
set off by itself like a compass point, its dense-dim atmosphere

between votive candles and the candied scent of dancers.
I depart late, frost drawn tight on my windshield.