A Web Chapbook from The Literary Review   

Terri Brown-Davidson
Oh I was thirteen when it began, the hand
slipping into me silvered by moon
decreased to the shadowiest slit
fluttering curtains cast,
for I needed to conceal the power of five fingers
from parents nodding and blue-headed in the no-light of TV





 Terri Brown-Davidson's chapbook Rag Men won The Ledge 1994 Chapbook Competition and was published to excellent reviews. A novel-in-verse, The Doll Artist's Daughter, is available from White Eagle Coffee Store Press. Her poetry is featured in the anthology TriQuarterly New Writers (Northwestern University Press, 1996) and she has received, among dozens of awards and honors for her poetry and fiction, the AWP Intro Award and residency fellowships from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Hambidge Arts Center, and Walker Woods. She holds the Ph.D., M.F.A., and M.A. in English and creative writing, and her poetry has appeared in more than four hundred journals, including TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Denver Quarterly.

A Work by Terri Brown-Davidson:

    CRAVINGS

    I had a craving for white chowder topped with garlic
    and parsley, that green-on-pale arrangement an aesthetic moment of sustenance
    in a life balling up tighter than both my fists. We agreed to meet at the Cliff
    House. Rushes of romantic opulence: sleek dark sea lions baying atop rocks, tranced
    into barking by approaching storms layering the horizon
    red. We ordered, clutching menus. Your father had just died.
    That shock of mortality rendering us mute. I wouldn't call us "craven"
    though we couldn't confront each other. And yet, lying
    in your arms one night, I'd remembered your father, how he'd trailed us everywhere
    eyeing us through his camera, a black beast of a camcorder enticing the trivial
    more seductively than "the best." Recording marigolds, sidewalks, daring
    to track neighbor women twist-tying trash in nightgowns, rollers, familiar
    as a gray-cardiganed shadow sliding where he was least wanted, seizing reality
    in the pedestrian so relentlessly that, a baby, I'd despised him, he slept eyeless,
    shrunken, face-up in that coffin, as if even the ordinary had failed him.