Lois Marie Harrod | The Song of the Albino Alligator

Born in Coshocton, Ohio, Lois Marie Harrod's 16th and most recent collection, Nightmares of the Minor Poet, appeared in June 2016 from Five Oaks. And She Took the Heart (Casa de Cinco Hermanas) appeared in January 2016, Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (Cherry Grove Press) and the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. The Only Is won the 2012 Tennessee Chapbook Contest (Poems & Plays), and Brief Term, a collection of poems about teachers and teaching was published by Black Buzzard Press, 2011. Cosmogony won the 2010 Hazel Lipa Chapbook (Iowa State). Dodge poet and three-time recipient of a New Jersey Council on the Arts fellowship, she is widely published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. She teaches Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey.

Lois Marie Harrod's website.

Also by Lois Marie Harrod: Nightnares of the Minor Poet Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis Brief Term How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Marlene Mae Likens Her Mother to Omega "The sunlight has never heard of trees"

March 2018
Ohio Poets

Lois Marie Harrod

The Song of the Albino Alligator

Though my love is green like the cypress I am the white egret that nests in his teeth. I know how words slaughter innocence, and the mouth … the white tongue must play with everything it meets, I have revealed all my secrets but one, the one you can see in my eyes, that pink iris of deceit. Every blandness must have blade, you know the scuttlebut about the pallid librarian — all night she grinds her teeth as I scratch through my seasons, bring up water from the dark below. There is too much black, too many black leopards and black mollies. too many white doves. I smile the smile that belongs to kindness. Think of me when you paint your nails.

I wrote "The Song of the Albino Alligator" about 10 years ago when I was writing a series of poems to give voice to that which had no voice, poems with titles "What the Elephant Sings," "What the Leaves Say," "What the Light Sing," "What the Mist Sings," "What the Phoenix Sings to the Ashes," "What the Polar Bear Sings." Most of those poems were published in lit mags and then re-published in Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis (2014, Cherry Grove). Somehow though I lost and recently found "The Song of the Albino Alligator" on my computer. As I remember, I began the poem when I saw a photograph of an albino alligator in one or another of the nature magazines I subscribe to. At first that alligator seemed ambiguous and mysterious, but as I began writing about it, she became as pure and deceitful as language.

< Previous (Babette Cieskowski)Next (Darren C. Demaree) >