Beth Bretl & Oody Petty
We've been workshopping poems together weekly for years, so our process was undoubtedly influenced by a familiarity with each other’s writing and writing process, not to mention friendship.
“Chain Stitch” began as an exquisite corpse exercise at one of our workshops and continued through email. One of us would write three lines and email only the last line to the other. Writing in response to that last line, the other would do the same. Once we agreed on a stopping point, we unveiled the hidden lines and the entire poem. We made edits individually and collaborated on which edits to keep.
“Divination” is the result of literally cutting up two poems and reassembling them as one. Each of us brought a favorite unpublished poem, cut it into phrases that were then mixed together, drawn randomly from a dish and placed in order in columns across the floor. From there we began to edit, removing phrases that didn’t seem to belong and shaping what we kept.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Chain Stitch
I.
Embroidered, iceberged
streets, the trees too bare
beneath the collar
theme and plate.
Who would you die for?
(Can’t say family or spouse)
so I say milkweed, limoges
the longer threads of moon.
II.
We fall to sleep once more
the milky way falls apart.
It doesn’t matter, others
take its place. And plenty star
jasmine around the fence
small hands at my neck, the theme
so many leavings. A hawk
perched on the high ledge of silo.
Harvested fields cross themselves.
III.
Make my body a prayer, she said
and covet will un-write itself in characters
who no longer come when called.
So which way home?
The eye, paisley of soul
rarely closes on its own.
IV.
We are sheep for the dogs. Our backs
the paving stones they crisscross. Our hocks
bloody with insistence, the way shadows
stick to jagged and fields uncrossed
stitch themselves back together.
V.
From a certain distance, what comes
is unpredictable. You and
canyons from 14A.
No hawks this high nor heaven.
Purslanes rot in radish fields.
This a price you will haggle over, red
doors and rooms they open to, commodities
that say too much of packed dirt and pitted fruit.
We cast into hours
and you arrive crescent
galaxy into morning, and again
mind orbits sense
and tries to still a bed
in the room of wine.
No matter the season, snow
settles on the mountain.
Divination
Steel in sunlight overhead the cottage, warmed
Before something
of the red nestles.
Will you take me as lantern
and others inside your arched October sky
often what is before her the condemned
footfall echoes nothing. I am river
forward
prognostication translated back into Latin.
From this point from the other side even inside
leaves worked their stillness of and wake with
deer whose shadow recedes through
birds and bells the loosening
wind untied us. By the slanting calculation
to see beside the point her obsession
terracotta turned amber and the raveled out—
it is dark for the light you here, plaiting
through every October—the leaves
crackling of I placed a gold sun, orange
all breath say of her mouth unlikely
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Oody Petty teaches English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and served as co-editor of poetry for The Cream City Review. Her poetry has appeared in Reed, Oxford Magazine, and Desire Street.
Beth Bretl received a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and served as co-editor of poetry for The Cream City Review. Her poetry has been published most recently in North American Review, Aufgabe and The Southern Review.