See below for a sample of three of the poems currently available on tables at Restaurant X. The poems we have collected here are: Carrot Colored Words by Tony Abbott, Leaves and Anorexia by Cameron Langford, and Mirage by Lou Green. A short bio of the poet can be found at the end of each selection. Also, if you are a local writer, consider joining the Charlotte Writer’s Club North, which meets the first Tuesday of each month at 7 pm. at 108 South. Main Street in Davidson. (For more on this club, contact Louise Rockwell at beagle7477@aol.com )

Carrot Colored Words
for Kappa and Jay
by Anthony S. Abbott

The dialogue goes something like this:
“I love you,” I say, it being the end
of our conversation. “I love you,”
you sigh weakly after long silence.

I challenge your desultory reply.
“It’s the word,” you say. “It’s been
overused. We need to find a better.”
I accept the task. For nights I search

for carrot colored words, for words
with tails and purple horns and long
red sashes round their middles. I scream
for green words with yellow spotted stomachs.

My doctor friend tells me how patients
miss medical terms. A woman in Georgia
spoke of suffering from “Smiling Mighty
Jesus,” meaning spinal meningitis.

Another had “Fireballs of the Eucharist,”
in reality fibroids of the uterus. If I
could choose, I’d take Jesus too. And those
fireballs beat fibroids all to hell.

That’s the kind of word I want. I fireball
you. I smiling mighty Jesus you. It’s cute
and satisfies your need for something new
but it’s not exactly what I mean to say.

What I mean to say is—if I was dying
and I could choose one person in the world
to sit and hold my hand and hear whatever
words I had to say—it would be you

and I know no better term for that
than love. If I find one, I’ll let you know.

Anthony S. Abbott is the Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of English at Davidson College. His book “The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat” was first published by St. Andrews College Press in 1989 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of three other poetry collections, “A Small Thing Like a Breath,” “The Search for Wonder in the Cradle of the World,” and “The Man Who” as well as two novels, “Leaving Maggie Hope” and “The Three Great Secret Things.”

***

Leaves and Anorexia
by Cameron Langford

Fall
leaves, singed,
auburn cackling up yellow,
small

Me, car, backseat,
sleeping bag tumbling over cooler,
Aunt Jemima peeking out,
sticky

I’m curled in the sleeping bag,
legs pulled tight under weathered quilt,
sweating—
it’s North Carolina October,
the leaves lie,
hot

The leaves are small,
red and yellow and green,
brown,
crinkling into themselves,
fetal

Like my friend’s sister,
the one who’s anorexic,
whose face looks—
not chiseled or worn,
or faded—

but like it’s curling into itself,
the auburn, her hair,
encroaching on the vibrant,
the yellow, her face,

sturdy ears bent over
and nose, the point tipping over
expanding nostrils.

The negative spaces are bigger,
ears and eyes,
nostrils, belly button,
everything else, tilting, falling,

gravity pulling,
pallor grasping,
like me, sweating
in the backseat, in the heat,
watching leaves.
fetal.

Cameron Langford is a freshman at North Mecklenburg High School. When she’s not waking up at 5:30 for school or seeking out arguments as a member of the Debate Team, she likes to read Stephen Dunn and scribble poems in her math notebook.

***

Mirage
by Lou Green

Maybe, a hundred yards in the distance?
A nest, the tone of amber? Gray-white,

too? The whole, on occasion, shakes,
as if breathing, swells, on cue diminishes. Perhaps

a wild and haughty Cooper’s hawk, having arrived
in morning silence, has come to roost high

in the top of the old, broken-down elm. Each waits,
each watches—seconds reeling to minutes,

minutes to one hour, when: the bling of noon
crystallizes everything, cancels the entire sight and on

fleet wings, amid the extraordinary rays of that far star,
you and the hawk are:

one.

L. B. Green has won the Randall Jarrell Harperprints Award for her poetry collection, “Judas Trees North of the House.” She is yet another poet, writer, and visual artist who believes in art as the spark for social and environmental change. During this April, National Poetry Month, she will continue to work on new poetry and literary nonfiction volumes as a writer in residence at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The poem, “Mirage,” drawn from the collection, “afterwords,” is written in rhyming couplets, and was inspired by the seemingly disappearing woods near where she and her husband, Louis, live in Davidson.