Some Nights the Entire Gravel Driveway by Alice White

By T.

25 August 2024

854

Some Nights the Entire Gravel Driveway
Alice White

is covered with fat orange slugs. Or frogs.
Or snails. You can’t run to the car barefoot
for something left there. You can’t step outside
to see the Milky Way splashed on the sky
without a flashlight. You have to look down
in the country. In the dark, you can slice
your foot open shattering a snail’s shell
like my toddler daughter did. Forget all
squeamishness: worse things than stalked eyes and slime
are smeared across the night, waiting for you.
It’s easy to kill without meaning to,
as easy as it is to die—always—
wherever you are—in the dark, a car,
the light— easy as the turn of a wheel—

MARGINALIA

1.
How fragile a body is—how easily it breaks, how quickly a moment shifts from ordinary to irreversible. You think you’ll have time. You think you’ll see it coming. But then something soft underfoot arrives in your life and suddenly you are undone.

2.
The danger feels most honest on the ground. I trust what’s beneath my feet. For example: the tectonic shift of grief. For example: the gravel that is my life.

3.
Would that I could describe to you how the world is constantly colliding with itself.

4.
I think of my own body, and the bodies I love, and how I’ve learned to scan tomorrow before I move, as if vigilance could undo the randomness of loss. As if watching closely could keep us safe. As if intention ever mattered more than chance.

5.
To be alive is to be capable of harm and still want to reach for gentleness. To walk through the dark anyway. To learn how to carry a flashlight, and still remember to look down.

KEEP READING

SHARED WITH GRATITUDE

This poem appeared in The Greensboro Review, Fall 2023, Issue 114.

DESCRIPTION

“For more than fifty years, the MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro has published The Greensboro Review. The journal began in 1966, when students in the first years of the MFA wanted a place to publish their creative work. With $500 from the Chancellor—“an amount that hardly covered the cost of printing 500 copies,” according to Robert Watson, poet and co-founder of the MFA program—students and faculty used the campus duplicating shop to print the debut issue, then collated it by hand. Greensboro painter Betty Watson designed the logo that is still in use today.

The mission of the journal quickly shifted from “a house organ for our MFA students,” and the Review began to publish writers like Ezra Pound and Joyce Carol Oates. But as longtime editor Jim Clark described, “the GR has always taken the most joy in publishing work by new writers at the beginning of their careers, and we are proud to include in this group such writers as Lewis Nordan, Yusef Komunyakaa, William Matthews, Alan Shapiro, Charles Simic, and Dave Smith.” In 1984, the GR established its Literary Awards thanks to an anonymous donor, and these prizes led to a more global following. Works from the journal are consistently included in the Pushcart Prize anthologies, Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards, New Stories from the South, and other collections honoring the finest writing by both established and emerging voices.” (Source)

ABOUT ALICE WHITE

Alice White is an American poet living in Canada after a decade in France. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Poetry Review, and The Threepenny Review, and has been featured on the podcast The Slowdown. She is currently working on her debut poetry collection. (Source)