A Tiny Turbine
That phrase comes to us from Cara Waterfall, winner of the Editor’s Choice 2020 Magpie Award for Poetry. Her winning poem ‘Hummingbird Elegy’ is itself a tiny turbine that generates immense power through its evocative imagery and elegant use of white space.
Pulp’s poetry editors and first judges Emily Osborne and Daniel Cowper had this to say: “Each short line in this elegy is like a prism’s facet, reflecting the bright tones and soft sounds of tiny birdlife. But the poem also cuts like glass, balancing the fragility and terror of mourning.” You can read the prize-winning poem in Pulp Literature Issue 28, Autumn 2020.
Cara has kindly gifted us with another of her captivating poems. About ‘The Chicken Carver’, she tells us: “I lived in Abidjan on and off for three years and would visit this atelier, overgrown with fronds and ferns, where an elderly man would carve animals or talisman, while seated on the ground amid rusted furniture and wood shavings. This poem is really an ode to perseverance and what it takes to be an artist in Côte d’Ivoire, where creativity and commerce must go hand in hand to ensure the artist’s survival.”
The Chicken Carver
atelier in Zone 4, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire
dawn saws through a scrapyard where a lanky man sits
legs akimbo hemmed in by two-limbed stools & helices
of cedar stonewashed jeans saddled in shavings scalp leashed
by dust ants chafe his ankles as the mosquito coil clots
with sawdust a transistor radio buzzes on its back
bent antenna broadcasting the chaos of static & ash
he is mining the wood hatching lines slivers drip with
every scritch-scritch of the chisel each scratch as
thin as a stitch he threshes a tremor of feathers & shirrs
the fleecy chest gouges the lithe hollow of the throat
scissors away a beak & smooths it with a rasp & its torso
ebbs into pedestalled claws they roost in pairs corseted
in scores he fishes another wooden block from the singed
underbrush spent firewood his hands shudder with
the held lament of decades of work when he rises
feet disheveling dirt spine limp as a marionette’s
his shadow drops into the deadfall a tree holds
the balding moon in its burnt fingers as he
disappears a plume of smoke
To read ‘Hummingbird Elegy’, and for more from Issue 28, visit our bookstore!
Ottawa-born and Costa Rica-based, Cara Waterfall’s work has been featured in Best Canadian Poetry, The Fiddlehead, CV2, The Maynard, SWWIM, and more. In 2018, she won Room’s Short Forms Contest and second place in Frontier Poetry’s Award for New Poets. In 2019, she was a finalist for Radar Poetry’s The Coniston Prize and was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. In 2020, she won Room’s Poetry Contest. She has a diploma in Poetry & Lyric Discourse from SFU’s The Writer’s Studio. Visit her website at carawaterfall.com.
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