Issue 6: Scott Owens

by Paula Lietz

Beautiful Tree Poem

Lying in bed I hear voices,

muted, distorted, probably just

the fan, sounding as I heard them once

on bended knees, Lord, forgive me.

Other times troubled, dreaming, uncertain,

He loves me; he loves me not.

I’ll be back. I promise. I’ll

never leave you. Sonofabitch!

How much more can I take?

What’s the point in trying?

Sometimes if I listen closely I hear

my grandmother on a good day saying

God is always listening, saying simply,

How beautiful the trees are.

Author of seven collections of poetry and over 800 poems published in journals and anthologies, Scott Owens is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and recipient of awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College. He grew up on farms and in mill villages around Greenwood, SC.

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Issue 2: Scott Owens

A Brief History of Almost Everything

No one could say exactly when it began,

some unseen fabric unraveling into something else,

composition more a matter of perspective,

design just as often happy accident.

Of course, there was a garden

where things could grow and go wrong,

full of bird calls, skittering of squirrels,

more things blooming than your wildest spring.

The devil, it seems, was there, living

behind the chimney on a white house

on Davis Avenue, three brothers,

cotton mills, graveyards and baseball fields,

hospitals and book mobiles,

and the usual presence of loss.

And then one man after another

tried to take over, the best

of them merely inadequate.

Next, girls appeared, the first time

on horseback. He rode behind one named Sunshine.

Four years older, she placed his hand

beneath her shirt, the other between her legs.

The rubbing was all that was needed.

They each tried to remake Mama

in their own way, each failed

more than once, settling after awhile

on something approximating bliss,

involving children and lawnmowers,

and places to keep what mattered.

Finally, he realized that all his thoughts

of first, then, next were little more than

convenience, and so he tried a poem

to get it all down the way it happened,

a little messy and all at once.

--Scott Owens

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