"The Sound a Broken Web Makes" in Soundings East

Thank you to the lovely editors at Soundings East for giving this poem a place to call home.

Aubade with Bread for the Sparrows

Sparrows II by Adam Binder

Aubade with Bread for the Sparrows
By Oliver de la Paz

The snow voids the distance of the road
and the first breath comes from the early morning
ghosts. The sparrows with their hard eyes
glisten in the difficult light. They preen
their feathers and chirp. It’s as though they were one
voice talking to God.
Mornings are a sustained hymn
without the precision of faith. You’ve turned the bag
filled with molding bread inside out and watch
the old crusts fall to the ice. What’s left
but to watch the daylight halved by the glistening ground?
What’s left but an empty bag and the dust of bread
ravaged by songsters?
There are ruins we witness
within the moment of the world’s first awakening
and the birds love you within that moment. They want
to eat the air and the stars they’ve hungered for, little razors.

Little urgent bells, the birds steal from each other’s mouths
which makes you hurt. Don’t ask for more bread.
The world is in haste to waken. Don’t ask for a name
you can surrender, for there are more ghosts to placate.
Don’t hurt for the sparrows, for they love you like a road.

Pastoral before Decomposition + The Grief Artist by Traci Brimhall

In half Light 2 by Prunella Clough.

Pastoral before Decomposition

I imagine it lovely, the place he was killed
imagine darkness as clear as it was before God

learned to speak, imagine the Milky Way burning
through the light-stained night, imagine trees blacker

than the sky, and then imagine cicadas grating April.
The cold was crisp, I imagine, and scooped out stale

carbon dioxide from his lungs. One of those good pains.
My imagination wants to redeem the bareness of fact,

so I imagine the field he dies in as a place we might
have picnicked, imagine wind entering his clothes

and leaving again—not the knife. No. I will only imagine
the way the cars versed themselves in curve and velocity

through the arterial streets. Not how the men took turns.
not the way his body proved to the medical examiner

that he struggled, lifted his hands to defend himself—
no, I imagine the grass, how it must have nodded along,

how his phone lit up with a blue light blinking, blinking
at the driver who stayed behind, his thumb brushing

the red END from the screen like wiping an eyelash
from his lover’s cheek. I imagine her, only hours away,

letting the spring salt into her sleepless room, Atlantic
waves curling in on themselves, red tide creeping toward

shore, and the suffocated fish with bellies like moonlight
doing what is surely required of all the dead and rising.

—from Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod by Traci Brimhall.

Like many people, I’ve spent much of 2020 and 2021 thinking about and processing grief. Individual and collective, minute and global, cellular and generational, past and present. This week, I read Traci Brimhall’s poetry collection Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod from Copper Canyon Press and found myself challenged on my own beliefs about processing grief. If this book is a woven piece of art, the warp yarns are made of taut grief and loss and the weft shot through—over and under, over and under—is made of joy, wonder, curiosity, and most surprisingly to me—imagination. Through every poem, Traci makes clear how intrinsically linked grief and imagination are. Often grief and loss are the result of violence, whether it is violence enacted by another (such as what the main character of this poem faces) or enacted by our own bodies (miscarriage, cancer, chronic pain, etc.) the two are often companions.

To process violence we have to access imagination. We have to imagine how such a thing can happen, we have to imagine why it continues to happen, we have to imagine ourselves as part of that violence and ask “Could I? Do I?” In opening our imaginations to the violence, we also open our imaginations to its opposite—what can I do to create instead of destroy? Living through grief. Surviving violence. Rejecting violence as a choice. All of these require imagination.

Reading Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod wasn’t enough, so I sought out more from Traci. In the essay “The Grief Artist” at Guernica, Traci writes: “The body has instincts for grieving, though I’ve always had trouble understanding them.” Traci’s poems in Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod explore how the body grieves, works through the process, imagines more and different ways of being. In short, the poems in Traci’s book provide a guide for how we can move through grief and violence, not with grace or patience as is often called for in grief literature, but with imagination. As a way to soften, reshape, remember, relive, pave a new way forward. Traci understands grief does not have to be graceful or fluid—“In art and grief there are days you’re not proud of, days the emotions turn ugly, days the images don’t turn out the way you want. But that’s the human in us, and it belongs in the process.” These poems contain the human, the ugly, the hard, the process. And they are better for it. And I am better for reading them.

For more on Traci Brimhall’s thoughts on grief and imagination, read this interview.

Auto-Immune by Destiny O. Birdsong

White Syringe Piece by Fernando Zóbel de Ayala y Montojo

"The white-coated vampire states it as fact: syringes

rinse the surgeries away. She’s got a house to feed,

where tiny mouths drool fluid like primed syringes.

I’m not dying yet, but she wants to be sure.

She asks me to deliver a ransom of syringes."

—from “Auto-Immune” by Destiny O. Birdsong from Negotiations

The syringes under my own bathroom sink fill with understanding, the bruises along my arms, legs, stomach, and butt feel tender-pressed with each word in this poem. When you find yourself standing, shaking in someone else’s poem, you know they’ve done something truly incredible.

The Undressing by Li-Young Lee

Anemone by Kiki Smith

“And I don’t know
what might bring peace on earth. But a man
fallen asleep at his desk while revising
a letter to his father is apple blossoms
left lying where they fell.

The son who comes to wake him by kissing
the crown of his head is so many things:
Love succeeding.
The eye of the needle.
Little voice calling the flowers to assembly.”

—from “Love Succeeding” by Li-Young Lee from The Undressing

In the Field Between Us by Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison

I’ve never read a collection of poems that so saliently addresses a life lived with a disability, in the shadows of medical intervention both the ones that linger behind you and the ones that are cast ahead of you, and how the scared body in pain exists in this beautiful and terrifying world. I cried over my coffee more than once as I read these intimate letters between Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison because I found echoed there my experiences, for the first time in literature not found in an obscure medical study found in the Google rabbit hole after a night of pain keeps me awake and wondering why and how I got there and if I am alone with it. I’m not. I have these overheard conversations, like clues toward an answer.

Again and again, came to mind the image of sea glass. Broken, ragged, sharp, raw, but through the tumble of waves something beautiful, smoothed, a story in its own right. These poems were the waves, I am the broken bit of glass from a bottle.

Bonfire Opera by Danusha Laméris

The first time I read Bonfire Opera by Danusha Laméris, my house was, for the first time in months, blissfully silent. My husband had taken the children on a bike ride, to donuts. It was not yet 8 am and the dog, cat, and I sat on the couch and I read the book cover to cover, pausing only 3 times. Twice to cry, once to refill my coffee. My pets were audience to the lines I couldn’t help but read aloud. The sunlight and the silence and the animals nearby created a perfect atmosphere for reading these poems (the only detractor was a distant weed-whacker, and even that brought contrast to the poems).

When I decided to read it again, I knew I needed to make it another beautiful moment. Aside from finding myself valuing these moments during a pandemic and worldwide pain, this is a book that deserves intention in its reading—though I believe that about most books. It doesn’t need intention or a beautiful moment (it would be incredible even read in a dirty bathroom stall at the world’s worse airport), but it deserves the reader’s intention, slowness, focus. I read this book for a second time on a 107 degree day, bright California light casting across my kitchen table, a cold cider at hand, a bowl of passion fruit picked from the vine outback nearby, watching my own garden wither in the heat while reading of Danusha’s lush garden, loss, grief, desire, and that bigheartedness that great poets bring to the page, to their readers, to the world. These are poems not just about seeing the world beautifully, but living beautifully in the world.

Below are two poems which stuck with me after both readings. Though, if I am being honest, this whole book is with me lately. Read it for yourself, let me know what you think.