Poetry Super Highway

Poetry Super Highway

September 2-8, 2013: Heather Eure and Katherine Durham Oldmixon

Heather S. Eure and Katherine Durham Oldmixon

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Heather S. Eure
 heathereure@gmail.com

Bio (auto)

Heather S. Eure is a freelance writer and the Poetry Editor of The Burnside Writers Collective. She lives in the small rural town of Hertford, North Carolina. She arm wrestles with the grit and the grime of faith and spirituality by writing poetry and essays. Heather is also a beginning watercolorist. It’s fun, but she tends to muddy things up a bit…and somehow, that seems appropriate. Visit Heather on the web here.

The following work is Copyright © 2013, and owned by Heather S. Eure and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Juniper in the Sand Dunes

Held high against the salt wash
You face the biting sting
Of an angry wind.
You there–
Defiant one.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon
drkatldo@yahoo.com

Bio (auto)

Katherine Durham Oldmixon lives in Austin, TX, where she teaches writing and literature and directs the writing program at historic Huston-Tillotson University. She is co-director of the Poetry at Round Top Festival and a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Her poems appear online in Qarrtsiluni, Poemeleon, and Solstice magazines, as well as in many print journals and anthologies and in her chapbook Water Signs (Finishing Line Press, 2009).

The following work is Copyright © 2013, and owned by Katherine Durham Oldmixon and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

La Esquina

for Willy Santiago

In those last days we brought up caracol,
tapped a hole in their spiny crowns,
pulled the bodies from spiral bones,
pounded and soaked the flesh
in saltwater, laid out the skeleton
shells still flushed scarlet in the sun,
and washed them in sand to cleanse them
of sea-stench. The glistening tubes
we let slide down our throats, laughing
at aphrodisiacal promise. Their guts
and eyes we threw back to the fish. Fresh
lime juice, tequila, cilantro, and cebolla
cured the raw mussel, though ceviche
and cerveza were hard on your liver.
You told us again how as a boy
you fished por mano in Puerto Rico,
while we huddled in hammocks, smoldering
coco husks warding off mosquitoes.
We never spoke of dying, but you were
already so thin. How did this come to you?

When you lay frail as dry coral
in an Austin hospital bed, you made
no sense, and we who never spoke
of dying talked of music,
your unwritten charts,
a flute’s breath line hovering
over timbales, trumpets and trombones,
the flutter of bongos,
rattle of rain-stick,
a conch shell’s
hollow moan—


–reprinted by permission of The Normal School 3
(Fall/Winter 2009).

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