What Nimrod Should Have Known

BY Julie Marie Wade

The word
like wood
is porous & prone
to splinter
The tongue
which is called mother
answers to a hundred
other names
The stutterer
child of slow illocution
of swift permutation
utters an equivalent truth
Even wrapped in
Eve’s garments
even wielding the sword of
Adam’s violent vernacular
The Jenga puzzle of speech
totters, glottal-stopped
in the throat of
forthcoming & forgotten
On the lips of the
blotted horizon
where the eminent & the imminent
capsize into reef & wave
And the twin pillars
of the crushed tower
jut forth from the sea: one boasting
Silence, the other Cacophony.

 

Biography

Born in Seattle, Washington, in 1979, JULIE MARIE WADE completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2004, she has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize, the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award, the AWP Intro Journals Award, the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize, and six Pushcart Prize nominations. Her first collection of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, is forthcoming from Colgate University Press, 2010, and her first poetry chapbook Without is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press as part of the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series, 2010.

 

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