Elizabeth Savage is an Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of Women’s Studies at Fairmont State University in West Virginia.  Two works in progress, Jamestown Koan and Forgiveness, West Virginia, have been supported by fellowships from Virginia Commission for the Arts and the state of West Virginia.  Her poems and essays have appeared in HOW2, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Meanie, and Whetstone and are forthcoming in Court Green. She is an associate poetry editor for Kestrel.

HOW2 literary journal
Court Green literary journal

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Three Poems:

Natural Bridge                       
         for M.L.C.   

I know a clean man who was
         a cleaner boy I
         met on  bus stops

and in school hallways his prim
         authority ordered
         the very air.  Into

         purposeful rays
         across assertive

geometrical planes uncluttered
         by collisions
         or indecision
 
chaos came anyway
         and he back
         to my back

yard frayed but dignified
         as the irises
         he carries

         from his.  And lately
         he has lifted

with them over the old
         neighborhood fence
         the messy girl

         who knew
         him when

[first appeared in Whetstone 2002]

Westerner

Homesick at thirty-one
            he leans
into the trail

            beneath a town
                        lost in the hills.

Next to him
            the skyless
river

            and the falls 
                        thawing

through splintered trees
            sharpen
his sorrow

            for traffic sounds
                        outside his childhood

windows still opened
            three thousand miles
away.

Queen Mab

A lean woman lives less
            than a mile
            from here

            where a wrathful
            envy turns
            her hair
                       
                        uneasy

around children
collecting
                        cats
                        branches
                        trees

                        every week she finds
                        everything
                        she needs

breakable apart
from unbreakable routine--

                        at home she is good
                        as she knows how
                        to be

emptying the hours
in dim efficiency

when days complete
with stars--or sooner

                        what counts
                        stands still
                        around her

and what she can’t

                                    stays out

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