Claretta Holsey
A response to Malcolm Corley
Every Good Boy Does Fine
the only son
of an only son
toppled over
-turned, done
caught wind
and ran
his tongue
o’er
the barren
smallness
of country –
Good Boy
burst
top of voice
at top of hill
w/ quickening
abandon – what
could not be helped:
grayscale scratching
the sour pulp
of a son
canting
a childhood
home
angular in silence
studded
w/ a brash
saying-so
Process Notes
Whether Malcolm has painted a portrait or a landscape, I am always imagining a human story underneath. In Wildfire, the sun and the flame are depicted with identical intensity, and so I am encouraged to think about legacy, the way one body begets another, the way violence is passed down (from father-sun to son). I am thinking, too, about the sound (in French, le son) fire makes as it spreads, and I compare that to the soundless movement of Malcolm’s painting: The harm unfolds in silence; I watch, doing nothing because what’s done is done, and I am implicated in the scene. In my poem, through soundplay and pacing, I wanted to capture the multi-resonance of this all-too-human story.
Responses to Malcolm Corley's Work
Claretta Holsey
Claretta Holsey is a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow and a Literary Translation Graduate Certificate candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A three-time awardee of the Academy of American Poets prize, she recently graduated summa cum laude with a BA from Stetson University. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in New Delta Review, The Columbia Review, Eclectica Magazine, PromptPress, Poetry Breakfast, Fishfood Magazine, and on Poets.org. She has read for the microjournal Black Poetry Review and is reading for The Iowa Review. She is the spring 2021 production intern at Copper Canyon Press.
