From realpoetik at scn9.scn.org Wed Jul 9 11:13:31 2014 From: realpoetik at scn9.scn.org (RealPoetik Magazine) Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2014 14:13:31 -0400 Subject: [RealPoetik] L.S. McKee Message-ID: POSTCARDS FROM THE DEMILITARIZED ZONE 1. Nevermind the haze nesting in the valley. Nevermind the tallest flag by the river dimmed— the woman will return home, bragging how she alone glimpsed a binocular flash from a lookout’s shack— how she saw his eyes look once then cut away while the river buried the sky a bit deeper. 2. *Here, the world ends,* she moans, as a spindle of light in the land-mined grass bends and gulps like a heron. Every tourist here is hawk-eyed, cradles visions in their blinking cameras: curl of barbed wire, nod of a bored soldier thumbing through the day’s instructions as his loosened helmet slips in the heat. 3. She strains to memorize the land beyond him— the other country borderless below a dismantled bridge— somehow familiar and yet like nothing before or since; a hill is a hill she thinks. The jackknifed grass; everything bends familiar. Once before she has seen it, the place, though not here, where lands blurs so near, only the birds carve through. *L.S. McKee*'s poems have appeared in *Gulf Coast*, *Blackbird*, *Ninth Letter*, *Indiana Review*, *The Louisville Review*, *New South*, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry from Stanford University. Originally from East Tennessee, she lives in Atlanta and teaches at the University of West Georgia. -- RealPoetik -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: