Why Humpty Dumpty Fell
“There were three girls jumping/double dutch on the blacktop below/him, and he looked down because/even their voices sounded nimble.”—Charlotte Matthews
Speculative Friction
By Claire Bateman
GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—December 2017—Charlotte Matthews’ most recent book Whistle What Can’t Be Said (2016) chronicles part of her experience with Stage III breast cancer. In addition, she is author of Still Enough to Be Dreaming (2007) and Green Stars (2005). Her honors include fellowships from The Chatauqua Institute and The Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers and a BA from the University of Virginia. She teaches in The Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program at The University of Virginia. She lives in Crozet with her husband, her two children, a Black Lab, and a very quiet fish.
Why Humpty Dumpty Fell
By Charlotte Matthews
There were three girls jumping
double dutch on the blacktop below
him, and he looked down because
even their voices sounded nimble.
This made him remember the way
his mother sang him to sleep at night,
each star in the sky reliably framed
in a hexagon from their wire coop.
He fell because, like all of us,
he wanted to know if someone
would care enough to try
to put him back together again.
To order copies of Claire Bateman’s books Scape or Coronolgy from Amazon, click on the book covers below.
Claire Bateman
Claire Bateman’s books include Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose); Locals (Serving House Books), The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan University Press), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), At The Funeral Of The Ether (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Leap (New Issues), and Coronology (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences such as Bread Loaf and Mount Holyoke. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. (Please see Bateman’s amazon.com Author’s Page for links to all her publications, and go here for further information about the poet and her work.) (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)