Andrea Carter

Our Kind of Coevolution

We chewed and swallowed
            the clouds, our long

            linen dresses drowned and
washed up later—

Solar storm poppies and coyote
            sage, a corolla of white fork

            tines, the hoarse wind through
the ghost grove cherries. Now,

I know how we started
            our pollination. You tongued

            your gold dust taste on me, and I
lit your sleep on fire—

 

Amalfi

—after John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

            Let her choose, and
you think you lose—

To become what she wants,
to love, to flower, to fruit,

that’s when you slam the door,
            the mad horses tear down the
stable, hooves clatter, necks
            lather. What heir, what nowhere—

She discourages, she eats
the apricots and the men,

            her brothers, wring their hands,
have to buy a spy, an assassin,

what’s gone wrong can
only go right when her

throat is cut. There is
            a wolf, her brother, the duke
who changes his fleas, and

her other brother, the cardinal,
weeps the gold he is promised,

            his mistresses prick
their fingers on the poisoned Bibles—

            and the country is no country,
only blood in the earth,
            only centuries of lies—

The brothers map the duchy,
            map the duchess, her body, for
riches. It is always her body until
            it’s a plot, an earth to

            grow, there, a garden,
and start the uprising—

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Andrea Carter is the author of Figeater, this year’s winner of the John Ridland Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. A poet and writer from Southern California, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mississippi Review, Crab Creek Review, Amsterdam Review, Comstock Review, Terrain, SWWIM, and The Florida Review, as well as in early issues of Anacapa Review. A finalist for the Bellingham Review Poetry Prize, she received the 2023 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize. She teaches at UC San Diego.