~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Tobi Alfier, Featured Poety

Tobi Alfier is published nationally and internationally. Her poems have appeared in Washington Square, The American Journal of Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Arkansas Review, Atlanta Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, The Chaffin Journal, Fourth River, Gargoyle, KGB Bar Lit Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, Nerve Cowboy, Permafrost, Spoon River Poetry Review, Suisun Valley Review, Chiron Review, Cholla Needles, War Literature & the Arts, The Galway Review, The Ogham Stone, and other print and online journals in the US and overseas.

In addition to seven chapbooks, she is the author of Grit & Grace (The Orchard Street Press, 2021), Symmetry: earth and sky which was published by Main Street Rag, 2020, Slices of Alice & Other Character Studies, published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, Down Anstruther Way, a collection of Scotland poems, published by FutureCycle Press, Somewhere, Anywhere, Doesn't Matter Where, published by Kelsay Books, Romance and Rust, Lapses & Absences, The Coincidence of Castles, a chapbook of Ireland poems (Glass Lyre Press). Both a reissue of Sanity Among the Wildflowers, and Calendar Girls Poems 2022, a wall calendar, were published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library. The calendar includes poetry and photographs.

Transubstantiation

To be hungry is to want

to chew your heart out,

eat it for dinner,

and that is my wildness for you.

Slowness descends upon the languid night sky,

frosting the lights with buttercream

chilled to mad proportions.

I watch my own hands reach for your face

like time-lapse photos

of opening peonies.

In winter it is hardly to be believed.

Lie back with me and watch the fire-smoke make

eye-level thunderclouds tumbling East.

I will be a ghost silhouetted against the bright,

my baser metals a gleam in the alchemist’s

eye as I dance from the flames,

unheard music thundering

just below the horizon.

Yes, I am hungry for your heart.

I am moved to have it.

As bread needs salt…

Cape Split

            Cape Split is quite literally the "end of the world"

                                                                        Google quote

                        I

Pain is like the prenup you forgot to get,

it takes all the sweetness, leaves you

with the pawn tickets.  You will never

be able to buy back an unfurled forehead,

true smile and the grace of comfort.

                        II

So you sit in the bar, listen to complaints

of other people’s unwanted houseguests,

drink just enough.  One more winter

outlives its welcome as you as you lick

your cold lips, search for a warm face.

                        III

The weather is ice over shade,

you need an elbow to pity you home.

This is not the first time.  The tide is out,

you are resting on mud, you need a pilot,

who knows your analogies are weak

and your pride is mighty. Like a ship a-sail

with no engine, you pray for wind to lead you

past the soft swell of young lovers to the breakwater

of hearth, to tea and the quiet compass of a stranger’s

voice bidding you safe travels, small hurts.