Carolyn Guinzio's book West Pullman won the 2004 Bordighera Poetry Prize and appears in a bilingual English/Italian edition. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Luna, New American Writing, Octopus, Colorado Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from Bard College and has received awards from the Fund for Poetry, The Illinois Arts Council, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She currently resides in Fayetteville, Arkansas with her husband, the poet Davis McCombs, and their children, Warren and Charlotte.
from West Pullman
VII.
One small night
in what might be the middle
of history, helicopters floated
low over West Pullman,
searching the streets for Sheila.
Down Princeton, up Harvard,
down Yale; and slow,
in its faint shadow, the car
with a police megaphone:
[red jacket, blue shoes.]
And it was for this
that light finally poured from the sky,
beams that could burrow through steel,
like the bright-pointed star
we all waited for, calling "Sheila."
Red jacket, blue shoes,
and a delicate neck
in the dark, billowing
and not held.
How many things ended
that night, and yet,
Sheila was buried
with forty-five words
in the back of the Monday Metro.
Then it was quiet again for a while.
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