Friday, April 16, 2021
a year of self publishing
napowrimo day no 16
from THE BIRD ARTIST
You can pluck out the heart and replace it with ash. The thrashing
of wings and feathers lasts only a second. Wire tongued, stiffed
with news print, it almost seems like a real living bird.
A real living girl. Or the one made of wood, poised outside the pharmacy.
Her ornate box. How she could tell your fortune for a dime, spit out
between her lips. Nothing below her hips but a deep cavern filled with coins
and paper. Nothing beneath her dress but spookiness and nesting sparrows.
You can pluck the song out and replace it with static, like a radio signal coming
far across the valley and down into our mouths. The houses
we burned to find the one with just the right amount echo. The men
whose hands forced open our throats and planted the seed.
You will go on a long voyage. You will find love when you least expect it.
Ask again later.
Thursday, April 15, 2021
napowrimo day no. 15
from THE BIRD ARTIST
One morning, they dragged the river for the woman whose husband
may have killed her. The children still in their beds come sun-up.
Come swallow song. The small shoes they clamored into
and out onto the lawn. The fawns that wandered through the fence.
and were shot summer before, blood everywhere. Even in our ears
as they cried. The children clutching blankets and bears, bleary eyed
and blinking. The birds outside were so bright that day they could have been
angels, godless, flailing. Could have been shadows, spotting the retina,
Could have been our own hearts, thrumming in our chests.
Diving blindly toward the windows.
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
napowrimo day no 14
from THE BIRD ARTIST
At dawn, my husband takes out the birds. Puts them to bed.
When we wed, a percussion of wings in the courtyard, but now,
they sputter and rust from the damp. Clutter the tops of cabinets,
the kitchen pantry. I find one, one morning, tangled in my hair.
Small, leaking oil in my palm. Crushed in the hush of sheets
and blankets we pulled back and forth between us all night.
How to account for such broken things, this wedded life.
The knife we put to love each evening, then took away.
The bride cake and it's frosting teeming with ants at the reception.
Spoiled in all that sun.
Not only can you peruse my conspiracy theories pieces the online version of the Library's URBAN LEGENDS: FROM PLAYGROUND LORE TO CULTURAL NORMS exhibit here, but it's also the debut of April's zine project offering of the same name, which also includes a slew of text pieces written this year. I read a few of these at the Pretty Owl Poetry release reading a while back, but otherwise, this is their official debut. Enjoy!
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
birds and drafts and juvenilia
Yesterday, I switched gears on my NAPOWRIMO exploits and started something I have a few notes for that's a bit more narrative in focus. I was laughing all morning that, yes, here I was writing mostly about birds again, then remembered this little draft tucked away in my drawers. Written so long ago, the paper, three ring notebook and lined, is yellowed and more brittle than it was originally. I think I was 16 when I wrote it after waking up from a dream about a dead seagull on a beach. I had moved on from drafting short poems in my blue diary and at that point, had taken to writing drafts on notebook paper and odd bits of pen-pal stationary. I still have most I imagine--all really, really bad, though maybe a bit better than the diary poems when I was 14. I didn't write anything like regularly in those days. Most of my life was school and otherwise lounging on my bed listening to music or reading. I probably would have told you I wanted to be a teacher of some sort (this was before my marine bio obsession.) The year before, it had been an interior designer.
"Poet" was not something anyone actually did, of course. Writer maybe...and I loved writing for the school newspaper and the very next year, would be a section editor. Maybe a journalist or a novelist, but never a poet. Not in my world. But still, I occasionally turned my attention that way--to verse--long after I had started writing for school assignments. This was also around the same time I made my very first artist book endeavor for our Scarlet Letter, though I really didn't know that's what it was. As I became involved with theatre my senior year, I thought maybe I could be a playwright. (though if you'd asked me,in my dreams, I was a Broadway songstress--hilarious since i am a poor singer.) There was a burgeoning Poetry Club that met after school with about 5 people in it, but I kept missing meetings due to rehearsals.
By then, by virtue of a charismatic AP Bio teacher I was being pulled toward science and environmental concerns, and the pieces I wrote for the paper reflected this, as did my decision to go to school in North Carolina that year. But still, I carried the writing with me--along with my electric typewriter and a penchant for perusing lit mags in the UNCW library between classes. A roommate, having again found me cross-legged on the floor of my dorm room again, typewriter in my lap, said as much as I seemed to write, I'd surely be a famous writer some day. I guess I am still kind of waiting to get there...but until I returned to the midwest, it was mostly prose and plays I was trying to write.
Sometimes, I think I should throw out all these drafts--those and the ones on wafer thin typing paper from college and my first submissions. The ones scribbled on random student government flyers, boring lecture programs, and class notes. The ones written during that last year of MA where i was finally making progress--some handwritten, some typed on my little word processor. Or after, the folders organized by year up to the point where I started organizing by project electronically in the mid-aughts.This makes it harder to determine exactly when something was written except by memory--everything lumped together in a book manuscript, largely since I write a lot of poems in a blogger file or dropbox doc and then just organize them by project, but rarely do I print out and retain individual poems. And ultimately, I suppose, once there were books, those are the final record of a span of work. Obviously those early drafts are really embarrassing and just take up drawer space, but they are also kind of endearing. They help me remember the years of trying to get where I am now, even when I have doubts it's where I belong or should be at all.
napowrimo day no 13
from THE BIRD ARTIST
Begin with screws and wires. The song is in the slide of metal gears,
the whisper of friction where the song lives, deep in the belly of the beast.
Out east, we slept through winter, feeling out the dark, coldest corners
of the house only in the middle of the night. My sister swallowed a bird
that eventually killed her. Willed her onto mountainsides and train tracks.
No one could wrest it from her throat, though we tried. Plied her with honey
and milk and still, she whimpered all night beneath the covers. Her lovers
slipping in and out the window. If you tighten the gears, you can approximate
singing but only to the untrained ear. After all, we were listening to the wrong
animal, the wrong music. By June, everything rusted over and out of tune.
Monday, April 12, 2021
napowrimo day no 12
from THE BIRD ARTIST
At first, we sat down for dinner at seven.
Our own little heaven filled with tea cakes and waterfowl.
The best china from the best places. My grandmother's linens
brought over on a sunken ship and tucked beneath her coat
while others drowned around her. They still smelled like the sea
when the wind was right, blowing on the line. Still harbored her fear,
damply rowing toward a distant shore. I would lie them out on the bed
and live inside them for awhile in the afternoons, while the flies
flicked at the window screens and the children played in the tub.
Each spot, so carefully rubbed out, but so much death woven into the cotton,
the taper of lace. At night, it would undo us, send us falling through sheets
of white and and into dark water. No matter how much we washed them,
they'd get caught in our throats. The boats too far off in the distance to save us.
(switching gears today to something else. I may return to the Walter Potter stuff near the end of the month, but I woke today with this little bit in my head, so we'll see where she goes.)
Sunday, April 11, 2021
napwrimo day no. 11
the fly
No matter where you go, it’s all shit
and rot. In the field, they don’t find the
dead calves for days. Fruit grows soft
on the vine, and I’m here for it--
every hole that needs filling, every mouth
slack open and eyes glazed over
with death. The robin fell from the nest
and already the insects were inside its
feathered body, breaking it down into earth.
Hard to tell what is living, already dying.
The ticker winding down to the final hour.
Muscle grown loose around bones, skin sag.
and broken teeth. How to know the difference
between the already and the almost,
not yet. Sometimes impossible. Especially
when god keeps lining up the bodies so lifelike.
Yesterday, the little girl in the field
who buried the bird, so carefully
with her rhyme but startled at my crawl up her leg.
Already her insides grown black with char.