Wheel

Jari Chevalier

Weeds blow
among ruins. Stones
cut to fit tight, fortress
razed to three
stones high.

People selling antennas,
fried bananas,
brooms, scratch
their chigger bites.

Cuenca’s cathedral,
where I place my running
shoes on the steps for someone,
light a candle.

Ornaments, vessels,
tools for killing or making music . . .
Incans lived without the wheel.
Vendor piercing

the square with ice cream
cries. Little hands,
sticky with ice cream,
washed in the colonial fountain.

In the market,
so many
chickens on spits
and a girl sobbing

beside a wire bin,
so overbrimmed
with chicken heads
they slide right off
the edge of the rim.


Jari Chevalier's poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Arcturus, Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast Online, The Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares and other literary journals. In Fall 2016 she won the inaugural poetry contest at Sheila-Na-Gig Online and was a semi-finalist for the 2016 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse magazine. In 2014 she received a Merit Award in the Atlanta Review International Poetry competition and was a finalist in the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Contest. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in writing and literature from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from CCNY where she studied with the late William Matthews and received an Academy of American Poets Prize.

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