Mara Adamitz Scrupe’s first chapbook, Sky Pilot, was nominated for the 2013 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. For her first book-length work, Beast, she was named the winner of the 2014 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. A graduate of Macalester College, as well as the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, where she earned an MFA, she has been awarded several national and international visual arts and poetry prizes. A finalist in Narrative’s Eighth Annual Poetry Contest, Scrupe is a professor of interdisciplinary arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

From “Fall Line”

by Mara Adamitz Scrupe


Reenactment
(Sailor’s Creek, 1865)

You,    from the North or some other
country you’ve entered
phantom land            you     makeshift
stained kitchen table disembodied
feet mackerel heap in a barrel severed
arm over there stiff hand
grasp air         the State police ran
tests    it’s real human
blood.
              You     every single
one of you in this place this
day want a spell to make you
him or her hiding     biding

People on couch
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