Editor's Note
What is that tired saying about actions speaking louder than words? Or a picture being worth a thousand words? I’ve long taken this demotion of ‘mere’ words with a practiced neutral face, but Liza Wolff-Francis’s poetry reminded me once again, why these expressions must finally be retired. Not because words are louder than actions, but because they are actions too. They move on the page, and in this case, drive, watch, listen, slow down, and finally stop. Stop, not at the end of the poem, but at the end of action, of breath.
And when employed by Liza Wolff-Francis, the words are alive not only in states of being, but of modals. Of possibilities and pasts, of consequent futures and gentle foreshadowing: the mill / that now looks like it never knew cotton, / like no dyes ever touched the river, / like cotton doesn’t have a history / of running people over. I was struck by how easily, seemingly effortlessly, timelines of the past and future made their way into poems that are distinctly about the moment. So much for words as action. As for how these words are worth a thousand pictures — I must let you discover those images yourself.
— Pervin Saket
The Bombay Literary Magazine
How we drown
Driving to the poetry reading
in the old cotton mill, next town over,
cars back up, waiting as a bevy of deer
cross the road like they are parading
new outfits down a runway to the beat
of house music on my car stereo.
I am the third car back.
Two mother deer, three babies, another
mother, another baby. I wonder
when they lose their spots.
I wait. The last fawn is in no hurry
to catch up to the others, follows finally
and the first car drives on, cautious,
then the next, then me. On to the mill
that now looks like it never knew cotton,
like no dyes ever touched the river,
like cotton doesn’t have a history
of running people over.
The poetry is like the sound of an owl
in the woods before a mill was built.
The drive home is a song I wish
I could find on the radio, but one
that hasn’t been written yet, with
an old melody, like how the land was
before people came. I pass where
the deer traffic had been, light dim,
and on the side of the road, a man sits
on the edge of asphalt and land.
I slow to see if he’s okay. His face
is red, his mouth, moving. Beside him
lies a baby deer, leg twitching.
It’s as if there’s a spotlight on them
and he talks to the deer as his hand
pets the dying body over and over, pets
the white spots. The world seems silent
like its heart is quiet right here, right now,
like all the poetry, song, and cry of the owl
was taken with a breath.
Tiger
People call you a big cat, as if that’s all you are,
a housecat, like Otis who would stick his face
in mine in the middle of the night, paw
at my nose until I awoke with two eyes
staring at me. No, you are not Otis.
If you were to jump on my bed from
the shelf above, I would be smothered
under your weight. You are
a hovering pounce, a striped halo.
You are not like Perla either, the cat
of my family in Costa Rica. Otis and Perla
are the two cats I have loved in my life.
Perla curled on my bed waiting for me,
claiming me as hers, as if assuring me I belonged
in that family, in that house, in that country.
When we found her body, it was stiffened
with poison. In my memory, it was as if
she was standing petrified rather than curled up.
I imagine burying a tiger in that neighborhood
like we buried Perla, under the trash pile the size
of a house, the only place we could go. We buried
her cold cat body in a thin plastic grocery bag
in a mound of garbage with soda bottles, pieces
of fraying carpet, old candy wrappers, coffee grounds,
rats. There is no plastic bag that would fit a tiger,
no way we could carry such an enormous body
in our arms. We spoke some words for Perla, said
a prayer, threw more garbage on top, walked away.
The tiger I saw in Ranthambore
strutted. Protected on a preserve,
he glowed in the forest. His size
made me hold my breath.
He could jump on our jeep-wagon-cart
and maul us. He did not.
Like a star actor on a stage no one looks away from,
he flaunted his stripes, his burnt orange, his muscle,
moving in front of the vehicle, he looked right at us,
took a piss, and sauntered off. I took a photo
and prayed to him as if he were a god.
When he disappeared, sound returned to the forest
in rustles and chirps, my heart slowed,
and all of the trees gathered to block the sun.
Wolf cousin
In the Georgia woods, she and I
smoke cigarettes between classes, smell
of the matchstick sulphur on our fingertips,
tobacco yellowing up my pointer
and bird fingers. She is wolf girl
and I am wolff girl with two f’s.
We made up a story. We told
our whole high school we were cousins.
Our story became one about family,
a Jewish family with converts
to Christianity who added an f
to the name wolf. Some believed us,
may still think it’s true. Here, the trees
have eyes, their branches hold secrets.
We could get in trouble, suspended,
phone calls to parents. We shrug, giggle,
ask ourselves what the family will say,
as if we really have the same family,
as if we really are cousins and oh,
how everyone will talk if we are caught
smoking in the woods during school.
Acknowledgments
Image credits: © William Redgrave. Tiger, Tiger. University of Chichester, Otter Gallery. Source: artuk.org.
‘Tiger paintings’ are something of a cottage industry, but Redgrave’s painting stands in a class of its own. This is not the first time we’ve chosen to put a tiger on the cover— Urvashi Bahugana’s poems in Issue 56 were accompanied by Gerhard Richter’s famous Tiger. It probably won’t be the last time either, so long as poets and painters continue to be inspired by these magnificent beasts.
Author | LIZA WOLFF-FRANCIS
LIZA WOLFF-FRANCIS is the 8th Poet Laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina and she has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She has taught creative writing workshops for over a decade. Her writing has been widely anthologized and has most recently appeared in The Phare, Walter Magazine, and Snapdragon Journal. She has a poetry chapbook titled Language of Crossing and a new book coming out in late summer 2024 through Kelsay Press called 48 Hours Down the Shore.