After Rain
A book of poems.
After Rain is a meditation on love, marriage, isolation, pregnancy, and motherhood. Full of revelation, reverence and revelry, these poems carry us through portals to reveal the stark beauty of life. With a keen sense of paradox and wonder, Carolyn Hunter’s poetry explores the verdant understory of our lives.
Set in the Rocky Mountains, After Rain is a portrait of a woman repairing her marriage in pandemic times, entering the wide berth of motherhood and tending the tender shoots of a new family. Hunter lets us peer over the sill of her marriage to witness its disappointments and enchantments. There are stories of longing for her ancestral roots in Ireland and her aching desire for sovereignty. She opens our eyes to the beauty of wild places and the wildernesses within.
With rich illustrations by artist Jessica Bernstein, After Rain is a moonbeam to light up the dark thresholds we all cross in the ongoing journey of becoming ourselves.
PRAISE FOR AFTER RAIN
“Breathless and breath-filled at once, this book somehow contains it all. Alongside Hunter, I met my ex-lovers. I strung up my dreams with the stars. I welcomed new life. I wept. Afterward, I felt reborn.” – T. S. Wolff, All Things Sane
"She let others believe what they want about her," writes Hunter. With this fearless collection, Hunter joins the likes of Joni Mitchell and Sara Bareilles, women who say what we need to hear.” – Abby Forrest Whyte
“Blueberries and creme brûlée. Canyons and ponderosa pines. A mother's loneliness and the scent of burning sage. To read Hunter’s transcendent collection is to taste life twice. After Rain is a must-read.” – MotherElm
“Like sunlight on morning dew, these poems sparkle and shine. Full of radiant colors, they lift our spirits and illuminate our lives, welcoming a bright new day!”
– T. A. Barron, The Merlin Saga
ASHEVILLE
I dream of blueberry scones
and when I add banana
I am Asheville
a cafe and a braid
the future
or another life
twice-baked before
in the heat of Appalachia
a dream in a heart of something more
laid to rest on the cooling racks
of frozen eastern driveways and ponds
a shop on a hill
the smoky mountains
a song beneath a river
a girl in a party dress
lost among the Spanish moss
Photographic Memory Camera, poems
-
Norman Rockwell
Do you remember when we were staying in that cabin in Evergreen with my family over Christmas and we were put in the kids room with the wooden bunk beds and red flannel sheets and you answered to me in both realms?
In the deep black of the night I had that horrible nightmare where I was being chased and I called out to you in my dream, over and over and over again.
But remember? I didn’t realize that I was calling out to you in that little room as well.
It was the wildest thing.
In the portals of my mind you were running to me, and right there in the middle of the small room you crawled down into my bunk and held me the rest of the night.
I’ll never forget how your arms and legs were hanging off that bed in every direction while you snored and I smiled and held you closer.
Sometimes you are a damn Norman Rockwell, and maybe it’s just for me to remember.
-
In the Lines
I hate how I remember everything you say.
Like a photographic memory camera locked on one setting. “They were like shimmering curtains. Like the spilling of paint onto a color- ing book in the sky, staying in the lines.”
You spill into my poetry and stay in the lines and I am sad all over again in the remembering.
-
Another Man's Gold
Sometimes at a thrift store, I buy a book that I have already read. One that I have two copies of at home.
I don’t read it again. I just hold it and immediately feel so warm and nostalgic inside that I want to cry because inside this little treasure is a world of love and loss and joy and sorrow, and friends who remain tucked away between two flimsy sheets of paper, faraway from my own rainy reality. And I just can’t believe that they were sitting all alone on a shelf for 99cents. And now I get to hold their world in my hands.
And then I think, maybe this is how God feels. But then I brush the thought away because it is too big a thought.
-
Piles of You
And in the autumn I fell like the leaves off the trees into piles of you, twisting and curling into something new.
-
Safe and Sorry
i was about 11 years old
i would put on my bikini and look over my shoulder into the mirror to admire this fantastically exotic mole on the corner of my left shoulder blade
it was my one and only mark and i loved it it was perfectly unlike the rest of me round and dark and velvety and beautiful
i had always seen myself as so... vanilla... so... pop sugar
and it made me feel sensual and powerful like i could leap right through the portal of that fabulous dark mark and into my womanhood
but then mom got skin cancer
and had to have pieces of her face removed and i had to have my portal cut
better safe than sorry all the grownups said and i learned that you can be both
you can stay so safe forever that in turn you’re a bit sad and sorry because of it
well...it was gone and it was a horrible red hurt until time made silk of it
the years passed by and i grew up and sometimes i would imagine it still with me
on my 16 year old shoulder in my strapless prom dress 25, glancing back at a man naked in bed
i’ve possibly been searching for this piece of me ever since
or i’ve been trying to prove that i am something that i’ve always been
but i know that safe isn’t better than sorry
and the world has too many of us that are both