Celebrating NAU Poets
Showcasing the works of NAU’s literary stars
With scenic Flagstaff as our home, it’s no wonder NAU has incredible poets and writers within our walls.
From our MFA in Creative Writing program to Thin Air — the campus literary magazine — we appreciate the craft of writing.
For World Poetry Day, we’re showcasing the works of our very own literary stars. Enjoy the poems below.
Will Cordeiro
Senior Lecturer, Honors College
Poems from Trap Street (2021), winner of 2019 Able Muse Book Award
Open Country
You scan the foothills where an outline shifts:
each vaster distance gives a clearer view
within — each vista where you look and look,
and every figure is transformed to nothing
but shadows walking at the edge of dusk.
Then past some cloverleaf, a Motel 6
shines then dims, its ice machine still laughing
to itself. A vacant moon tricks out the clouds
over fields like gold we have no standards for,
far jack pines sopping up the last dark light.
Ride on. A scarecrow gnawed to sticks and rags;
a hide left curing next to guts it’s spilled,
which tortured flies have claimed by squatters’ rights.
One day your heart will rot like gopherwood.
You’ll wake and watch a river pour away.
(originally published in Best New Poets 2016)
Mirage
Stalled clouds have orphaned shadows on the dunes.
The tide turns in, lifts salt breeze through your hair,
as fading sunlight fills an empty room.
You smell a storm approaching in the air.
A door abruptly opens on the sea,
a deepened blue of bay that’s laced with sails.
There is no plot. There’s only vagaries
of sky foreclosed on summer holidays,
moon’s influence on borders it repeals . . .
Light clarifies the wreckage left by waves
while beach-grass necks and sways all afternoon.
How easily one’s life is paraphrased.
(originally published in New Walk)
Nizohni Point
Boneyards beyond each shadowed level,
blue sediment and nuances of far continua:
carved buttes and saddled clefts upshift and settle
while scoria accrues. A silhouette of kestrels cruise
over parched defiles; fields now darted, reveled,
flushed of rich brown nameless birds, which lob
and swing like lassos before each wing collapses
into flock, down thrust of rock that ravage lapses
200 million years, more or less, grafted-in and cobbled
to an unconformity of ash, some crusted trash the wind’s
lobotomized. A wine-lit dusk — not much consolation
as the tiny spiders hobble on their remaining crutches.
(originally published in Copper Nickel)
Manifest Destiny
Old Route 66
Long walk past sun-cracked faults
of country, trap rock trace
on highway given way
to rip-rapped, driven tor —
a roadbed’s bedrock, vaults
of rusted flasks: rest place
scorched to flake, annulled. Pay-
dirt paved over, laved & scored
by sand-grains poured down
wind. Come see America end
to end: hardscrabble towns
graveled, bellied up, or burnt.
By badlands past renown
this buffaloed, hell-bent
stained off-road trail of stones
tears off to no return.
(originally published in The Museum of Americana)
Pay Phone
I still recall those lovers’ hands
That gripped me tight, their mouths pressed close, ecstatic,
Days I was a Laocoön of twisting limbs and
A breathless pulse of static —
Now, sticky, busted, sprayed, and spewed
With tags nearby some underpass I stand
Filled up with apple-cores, gum-wrappers, residues
As if a garbage can
Or upright, coffin-sized dropbox.
A businessman who buzzes by refuses
Me a glance; whips his touch-screen iPhone out that mocks
My tangled, earthbound muse:
My book — once thick with every name
That spells the rendezvous of city blocks —
Has minced to pulp. My folding door, some jerk has jammed
His flyers in, is locked;
The symbols rubbed until they’re gone
Along my pad, each key almost remains
A mangled hieroglyph like the Rosetta Stone.
Dangling off the hook, I am
No more a hot bed for erratic
Counterfeits in encounters fit for one
Who hangs on every word and pumps spare change in quick
Before the dial-tone.
(originally published in Fourteen Hills)
Nicole Walker
Professor, Department of English
Poems from This Noisy Egg (2010)
They Used to Call It April
There are no more days. The blossoms threaten
each one torn off by the wind. It is late February
and nothing is supposed to be happening yet. Not
even the seed catalog has come in the mail but
mom keeps hollering from the kitchen Shut
the door, you’ll let the flies in and I’m like, dude,
there shouldn’t even be maggots yet. My friend Neil
Cobb calls from the research station to say, yes,
the Ponderosa we planted last year has turned
into a yucca plant. I take the dogs walking in
the forest that had once been full of ponderosa
and now is full of cutting yucca with my
friend who has just arrived in town with a U-Haul
carrying her drums and bicycles. She does
not like the way the female dog growls at the new
baby male dog. I understand. I try to get her to stop
but two weeks ago, when the storms blossomed
over the peaks, this woman-dog wrapped her
body around this baby, man-dog — not hers (pound
found) and warmed him in the soil of her
belly. My friend has given up dry soil for a trip
to Oregon. Oregon doesn’t suffer yucca kindly,
at least not in the Willamette Valley where the seed
catalogs themselves are born. Who knows birthplace
anymore? My mother, she has run out of water.
We eat corn like the Wupatki, ground in a metate.
We should have taken a hint when not even the flies
would touch it. Mealy meal. Tortillas with no lard.
We listen for the tink tink sound of dripping in the caves.
We wish we knew where they kept the wells. Snow
fills the aquifer only in January now. Autumn’s red end
bent its metal tube in half. Crimp! We try to ride our
bikes through the forest. The dogs follow. The wind
follows. The blossoms follow but no matter
how fast we pedal, the rain will not come.
Lilac Horses
Short horses are mules who still do some work
but ATV’s have taken over the business of most
of what the horses used to do. Horses are now
long-legged cows hanging out by the edge
of the road looking over the edge of the fence
not quite knowing if they’re being kept out
or kept in. I haven’t touched a horse in so long.
Not since my great-grandmother died and the farmer
behind her fence let us feed apples to the horses
who aren’t there at all anymore.
The horses,
the apples, the farm.
And then I walk toward the horses.
I finally stop driving away from them
I finally stop thinking of them as cows on
the way to the Purina factory by my house
but instead as carriers of dust and seed and tall
men. I find an apple in the bottom of my purse
and although I am still afraid of big teeth and broken
wrists that don’t allow me to get any work done
on the back of an ATV as I ride out into the canyons
where those broken cows work their way into a cave
and can’t find their way out, I hold the apple
forward and say, not that you’d do better, horse,
but at least when you’re stuck in a canyon without water
you have the good grace to imprint yourself on canyon walls.
Make pictographs of your once-there’d-ness
even if you have already become smaller than you were.
Two Guns, Arizona
Spontaneity. Who doesn’t want some of that? I-40 East, on our way to Winslow,
on our way to dinner, early in the afternoon, we had time to stop at Two
Guns, where we were not the only ones to fight about which of us knew
this place first. I’d read signs. You’d read the paper. The Apache and the Navajo
read water rights, Canyon Diablo crossing, and grass you could eat and grass
you could blow through. Over the scooping sound of you telling her about the route
that swung through here for forty years, I’m yelling at you to keep our kid off that
old bridge, concrete windows so wide even I could fall through. Let’s look at the gas
station instead, I say, the one with the posted sign “Regular” fuel as if fuel was any-
thing but regular now. Everybody’s got a full tank but I remember analog
clicks and manual handles that I want to show the kid but you’ve got her off again
looking at that sign “Mountain Lion.” To her question, what is a cage? I can only
shake my head and look at the car and the road and the distance between dinner
and the car and say, you know, stuck, trapped. “Did they like it?” and I roll my
eyes because have you ever met a mountain lion in a zoo? It’s not the pacing,
it’s the sleeping that will break you open like these cages here made out of ruined
stuff, broken squares of stone hacked off and hodge-podged together to invite
the tourists. Then, again broken. And here we are, looking at rebar wondering where
they put the corn and where they put the animal feed and where the first stone tore
out of the mortar and rolled into Canyon Diablo, where chunks of limestone float
above a ravine that could still be transacted — (you can see the remains) — of a bridge
one side — where the Navajo (or was it Apache) had crossed to claim as theirs,
and one side mine, the one I’m on and the one I won’t let our baby cross. It’s bare-
ly a structure, let alone legal. Search and Rescue flying over, coming to dredge
her out of that one slice of water in the whole corner of this route and the I-40
which too will be surpassed by another interstate and even this spot where I stand
where holes appear in my argument, (you read it first), the one that is losing sand
beneath my feet, (you first, I only saw signs, and I’ve never been here before), di-
vorcing Southern Arizona from Northern Arizona and you are on that side
with the Apache and I am over here with the Navajo and the old man named Two
Gun who hid out in the cages before they caged any lions and threatened to shoot
anyone who came on his land, where the cows graze and stumble, slide
without grace down the slope, over the rock, into ravines where animals nouveau,
animals without babies, animals without thirst, animals without grass, animals who
fear nothing but the highway cutting out their thorough-fare, making their grounds a cul-
de-Sac, a dead end, shoved against the concrete of a curb so now there is nowhere to go.
