Danielle Beazer Dubrasky is a long-time resident of Cedar City in Iron County. She received her PhD in creative writing from the University of Utah and an MA in English/creative writing from Stanford University. She is the author of Ruin and Light, winner of the 2014 Anabiosis Press Chapbook competition, and of Invisible Shores, a limited-edition letterpress folio published through Red Butte Press (2017). An associate professor of creative writing at Southern Utah University, she has taught there since 1990 where she directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values. She is also director of an annual fall creative writing conference on Eco-poetry and the Essay. Her manuscript Drift Migration has been recognized through the following awards: Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award: Semi-Finalist 2019, Able-Muse Book Award: Honorable Mention 2019, Back Waters Press Competition: Semi-Finalist 2014, White Pines Press Poetry Competition: Finalist 2010, Utah Arts Council Original Writing Competition: Winner, Book-length Poetry Prize 2006. Her manuscript Anchored to the Sky (originally titled “Ruin and Light”) was a semi-finalist in the 2013 Elixir Press Poetry Award. Other awards include the following: Pushcart Nomination: “Petroglyphs in Parowan Gap” (2019), Best New Poets: “Petroglyphs in Parowan Gap” (2019), Utah Original Writing Competition Second Place Prize in Poetry: “Circadian,” “Lighting Out for the Invisible,” “Vivarium” (2018), Utah Original Writing Competition Honorable Mention in Creative Nonfiction: “Juliet” (2018). Cave Wall Broadside Competition Honorable Mention: “Palimpsest” (2017), Best New Poets: “Snow in March” (2015), Utah Original Writing Competition First Place Prize in Poetry: “The Sand Man” (2010). She is a three-time recipient of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, South Dakota Review, Limberlost Press, Ninth Letter, Main Street Rag, Pilgrimage, saltfront, Sugar House Review, Cave Wall, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Under a Warm Green Linden, Terrain.org, Contrary Magazine, Tar River Poetry, 15 Bytes, Exponent II, and Dialogue. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming anthology, Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies of the Beckoning Wild (Torrey House Press), and the lead author of a curriculum for poetry therapy "Discovering Inner Strengths: A Co-facilitative Poetry Therapy Curriculum for Groups" published by the National Association of Poetry Therapy Journal (2018). The former poetry editor of Contemporary Rural Social Work Journal, her editorials explore the poetics of place through the intersection of rural communities, poetry, and human services. She conducts workshops on “Poetry and Symbolic Landscapes,” “Poetry in the Canyons,” and pedagogy workshops on the teaching of poetry. She serves on the governing board of the Utah Humanities Council and is originally from Charlottesville, Virginia.
Works
Petroglyphs at Parowan Gap
Petroglyphs at Parowan Gap
All things crisscross before they disappear into a silence
throbbing between jutted rocks. A trucker drives on a road
perpendicular to the wind gap, visible for a moment, then gone.
A Pontiac guns from the closest town, swerves toward me, honks,
and the men spin away, laugh at my startled jump—I give them the finger.
Our sacrilege breaks the reverie summoned from eons of layers that streak rock
masked with graffiti—names and dates trespassing a map
carved five centuries ago in sandstone: notches, ladders, squares filled with dots,
a sun-circle of concentric rings that gives passage to the next traveler.
If we live in dreams, our eyes opening and closing to vistas we create
unless we step into someone else’s meditation, then which ancient one
dreamt this intersection of lines—the distant trucker, the men, and myself,
who wander past a length of road into spirals so carefully engraved?
Our crossing notches a groove in my palm—a new map I now see in my hands.
Previously published in Sugar House Review
Nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize and 2019 Best New Poets
Night Patterns
Night Patterns
Sunday evenings a widow of thirty years closes her book
on the red hills she has known since childhood,
gathers autumn roses in a vase to call her husband back
and waits for him to carry her over the next threshold.
Our other neighbor’s chimney blots the sky with wood smoke
after his wife left him to the clicking tongues of townspeople
who never saw her shudder beneath the anger masked behind
a handy-man’s smile that raged against their sons until all three boys
scattered by the roadside—one fell into thorns, the other on fertile ground,
and the youngest never opened but overdosed on a couch in the basement.
I once felt the hand of God over my eyes—
I stood in the middle of town on a winter night,
stretched my arms wide across rooftops and with one hand
reached for snow-covered volcanic peaks on the western side
while my fingers traced fossils in sandstone cliffs to the east.
I was in love with someone and maybe I mistook him for God.
But tonight Sulli’s Café burns neon over Main Street
and I am out of sorts in my eighth month of pregnancy,
my husky shaking her collar beside me as we walk past houses
blue with television light, and the closed haunted Lunt Hotel.
I have lost many people—my father, my brother, a friend.
In two days our daughter will be born, but I don’t know that yet.
Conceived on an early March night, she is still on the other side—
the shuttered streets and trace of wood smoke, all I can embrace on this one.
Previously published in Open: Journal of Arts & Letters
Palimpsest
Palimpsest
We were a strange coupling in the skeletal frame
of the house we trespassed near the highway.
You carried me piggy-back across the threshold
and I stuck my head through the unfinished kitchen window
overlooking the yard’s debris: broken bricks,
a fire pit, clay pigeons shot into half-moons.
Neon signs flickered across the valley
—Little Wonder Café—your mother waits tables, 1948,
boys she knew back from the war,
generous tips and offers all ghosts now.
Wind rattled studs of the walk-through closet and master suite.
We have been gone so long, I can’t give you back that day.
I can only wish us into another framed window
where dusk mutes the swing set in the backyard,
and we watch our children pump their legs
higher into the air until they fade beyond sight.
We are still asleep beneath the roofless sky
in that bedroom of plywood and tar paper walls
where we dream of old bullet shells, cracked terracotta,
and scorched rocks burning a million years into our hands.
Previously published in Cave Wall
Great Basin
Great Basin
I am no nearer to what the sea tries to loosen wedged in rock—
a sorrow slipped between a trapped metal cap
and glass shattered along another coast.
The truth is I don’t live near the ocean
but in a desert town I refuse to see
built on an alluvial fan of gypsum soil shifting
beneath cracked plaster and skewed door frames;
beneath miles of silver sage, rabbit brush, dry lakes
and wind trembling through pinyon rooted along the highway.
I leave my own trace, planting wisteria, honeysuckle—
southern foreigners thirsting for water.
I blink and the town is gone, drowned in a sea of fossils.
What that sea left behind is the desert I walk through,
a sorrow slipped between trilobites and shale.
Previously published in Invisible Shores, Red Butte Press, and in Fire in the Pasture (anthology)
Bibliography
- Invisible Shores, Red Butte Press: University of Utah. 2017.
- Ruin and Light, Anabiosis Press: Boston, MA. 2014.
