Gretchen Steele Pratt

Gretchen Steele Pratt is the author of One Island, from Anhinga Press. Her work has recently appeared in the Southern Review and Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Matthews, North Carolina, with her husband and three children, and teaches at UNC Charlotte.

Poetry – Issue 33

•Silence in the Garden, Silence in the Halls

At the lowest of tides / we go walking / through the low tide / mansions, surfaced, / stairways roughed with / salt, barnacles, // the banisters salt-cured / white.

Poetry – Issue 25

•Little Girl Buried in a Keg of Rum

Schoolchildren leave her their things—plastic bracelets, crayons, oyster shells, / sand dollars. We know only her surname was Sloo (rhymes with snow).

Poetry – Issue 18

Poem to Be Thrown over the Wall

I have dragged it through the deserted harvests, / Brown for centuries, the wood of the windmills / Crumbling in my hands, across the frozen river, // Still scuffed with shoes, the last frost fair empty….

Poetry – Issue 2

Famine Roads

Across Galway Bay, / crumbling limestone roads / still cling halfway up the steep Burren, / Irish for ‘a stony place.’