Attention Deficit Pastoral by Kwoya Fagin Maples

Attention Deficit Pastoral

by Kwoya Fagin Maples

Or how, if there is field before me—broad sky,
and too much green—I lose my breath,
forgetting.
Unable to keep up with my body,
now lifted off to wonder.
My children knock
around my knees, yet I can’t hear their pulling.
So much is stunning me at once, the sun
on me at once. Why this?
I go in blind direction
smelling woods or earth or air,
so many roads of grass
under my shoes.

Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer from Charleston, S.C. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and is a Cave Canem Fellow and a current Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow.  She is the author of Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), which was named a 2019 Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Mend was also finalist for AWP’s Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. In addition to a chapbook publication by Finishing Line Press entitled Something of Yours (2010) her work is published in several journals and anthologies including Blackbird Literary Journal, Obsidian, Berkeley Poetry Review, The African-American Review, Pluck!, Tin House Online and Cave Canem Anthology XIII. Her most recent poetry collection, Mend, was finalist for AWP’s Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Mend tells the story of the birth of obstetrics and gynecology in America and the role black enslaved women played in that process. This work received a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.

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