Chelsea B. DesAutels
Above the prairies now plowed
to farmland a wake of buzzards circles
something dead in the field.

It is July. My grandmother has died.
We are returning to the hills.

In the front seat, my mother's
shoulders rise and fall
like creek water

trembling over a boulder
left a billion years ago
by an ocean we believe in

because, although it is dry now,
it seems right that we come
from granite and sea.

When my father, driving, explains
how it happened—the bleeding—

we pull over so my mother can be sick.
In the ditch by the exit for Plankinton,

the sun is as hot as I remember it.
Soon, we will reach the Missouri River
and the flat land will begin to crease.

Because my mother's silver hair is too short
to hold while she vomits, I put a hand

on the small of her back. After the river
come the badlands. After the badlands,
the hills grow black and soft

into skies that force their own kind
of weather. My mother knows
this journey well, has probably traveled

west on 90 every year since I was born. She asks
to switch me places, so that she might lie

down in the backseat. I try to make her
a bed from a jacket and a pillow.

What can I do to ease her terror?
My mother. I've never seen her
all at once before.
from the journal THE MISSOURI REVIEW
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"The Poet Who Taught Me to Be in Love With the World"

"O’Hara’s poems have an intoxicating swagger. Even whipsawed by snow, by city traffic, by volatile love affairs, he displays a deep delightedness. Getting his heart broken only makes him more adventurous; he’s just happy he can be the first person to take you to the Frick; he’s grateful he gets to 'drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much.'"

viaTHE NEW YORK TIMES
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Sarah Audsley on Suji Kwock Kim's Notes from the Divided Country

"It was 2011, at The Frost Place Conference on Poetry after Vievee Francis’s talk. Afterward, when I became a bit emotional—her talk opened me up; the best talks do; I cried—she looked at me and told me to read Suji Kwock Kim, to search out and to read poetry by Korean/Korean American poets. As an adoptee, born in South Korea and raised in rural Vermont, this was a decisive moment for me."
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