The Importance of Elsewhere

Abstract

The Importance of Elsewhere Jane Craven (bio) In the town where I was born tired of waiting tables I promised a boyfriend half the gas money talked him into drivingwest. Left the crunch of frosted grass underfoot sped pastfields of my ancestors riven by interstate broken cornstalksof Quakers their inner light stored in leafless vines veining the rockspringhouse where I found as a childa shattered tintype: woman in velvet chair coloredby hand corsetedsunlight raking through clapboards. All my mothers were prisoners. [End Page 52] Crossed the Mississippi land of fish and madnessate in the car outside a Hardee's in the Ozarks fucked in a pup tent pitched on a rocky outcropdrove fastthrough restless technicolor orchestral canyons painted desertcrossed super-sonic salt flats Bakersfield its bleak infinityof artichokes. Then the unsleeping Pacific where I waded joyfulinto that other ocean. [End Page 53] Jane Craven Jane Craven is an MFA in Poetry candidate at North Carolina State University. Her work has appeared in The Columbia Review, Tar River Poetry, The Texas Review, Cold Mountain Review, and Atlanta Review. She is the recipient of a 2018 Academy of American Poets prize judged by Diane Seuss. Copyright © 2019 Berea College