Carolyn Howard-Johnson is a widely published poet and the author of several marketing manuals for writers, including The Frugal Book Promoter. Her site The New Book Review features original and reprinted reviews, to help authors maximize the exposure of a good review. (This month, they’ve re-posted a review of my chapbook Swallow that first appeared on the Ampersand Books website.)
Carolyn’s poem “Inevitably Walls” was recently accepted for the first issue of the literary journal Solo Novo Wall Scrawls. The journal is published by Solo Novo Press, Carpinteria, CA and North Wilkesboro, NC. Editor Paula C. Lowe says, “‘Wall Scrawls’ is inspired by an Iowa farmhouse wall. Eighty years abandoned and orphaned, it is a hive of letters, a busy kitchen of words. Every kid with a can of spray paint somehow gets here and leaves his or her native tongue on the walls.” They’ve kindly given me permission to share it below.
Inevitably Walls
Near Jerusalem’s edge razorwire
coils above concrete slabs that trace
an imaginary line across the brutal
desert much like a wall we found
years ago when we lost our way
in a dark forest somewhere
in Germany, cried when we
found it there—unexpected—and it
not so different
from one in Ireland we visited only
last year, walls to cleave Irish
from Irish. Foreign walls, chains-linked,
wire-barbed, Krylon smeared walls
not so different
from our own, that fence that crawls
from Baja, through mountain passes
along the Rio Grande. Walls. Feeble, useless,
unholy billboards. Even poets
once wrote of mending walls…
