Souvenir

A Journal

"I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave".----Breece D'J Pancake, in a letter to his mother. 

ALYSE KNORR



I got my favorite souvenir in college, while I was studying in Dublin for a semester. I took a weekend to fly to London to visit my good friend Amy, and we went walking around a big outdoor flea market in Notting Hill. It was my first time seeing London, and I was amazed at how huge it was. The flea market had WWI-era gas masks, beautiful antique magnifying glasses, and old fur coats. To remember that day, I bought a little old timey metal matchbox car—a blue truck with the name of a “biscuit” company on the side of it. I still keep that car on my desk—it reminds me of that visit and of the first big travel adventure of my life, a classic coming-of-age exploration. 

Alyse Knorr is the author of the poetry collections Copper Mother (Switchback Books, 2016) and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books, 2013). She also authored the chapbooks Epithalamia (Horse Less Press, 2015) and Alternates (dancing girl press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, storySouth, ZYZZYVA, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Georgia, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University and serves as a co-founding editor of Gazing Grain Press.