Kerri Webster
Wesleyan University Press | Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan Poetry
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
© 2018 Kerri Webster
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill
Typeset in Sina
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Webster, Kerri, 1971–author.
Title: The trailhead / Kerri Webster.
Description: Middletown, Connecticut : Wesleyan University Press, 2017. | Series: Wesleyan poetry | Includes bibliographical references. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017043088 (print) | LCCN 2017043317 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819578129 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819578112 (cloth : alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3623.E3974 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.E3974 A6 2017 (print) | DDC 811/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043088
5 4 3 2 1
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, in which some of the poems in this volume first appeared:
Anthropoid: “Hulls Gulch,” “Winter Of (And I Took the Chemise Off)”
At Length: “The Night Grove”
Better: “Skins”
BOAAT: “The Spinster Project,” “Of Deborah,” “Wilderness, Poetry, Sex”
Denver Quarterly: “One Eye Dilated”
Grimoire: “On the Nature of Righteous Action,” “Towards an Ethical Religiosity,” “Reasonable Miracles,” “The Trailhead,” “Invert Sky,” “Vanitas”
Guernica: “Corpse Flower”
Los Angeles Review: “This Is Manifest”
Newfound: “Solastalgia,” “Swan/Not Swan”
Poetry: “Hermeneutics”
Gratitude to the Idaho Commission on the Arts for a grant that helped in the writing of this book.
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This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. |
Front cover illustrations: Deer and Elk Anters © @snehitdesign. Pebbles, [email protected].
CONTENTS
21 Winter Of (And I Took the Chemise Off)
44 Towards an Ethical Religiosity
59 On the Nature of Righteous Action
PART I
HERMENEUTICS
All winter she’s been growing more powerful.
Radiant, says the man at the bar.
Voluptuous, says the docent.
Nervy, says God.
All winter her soul has been juddering.
It feels like drinking gold flakes!
The word sleeps inside the stone.
The wind tongues the underside of the lake.
Inside the rifle scope of time, God
teaches her Grounding Techniques
through his emissary, a Certified Therapist.