every July, it’s tallying up the deaths;
every July, it’s my brother (before the accident) asking me how many people will have to die in my poems before I’ll finally be able to make up my mind. I can’t stop seeing blue faces against white lakes, a picture of us huddled together by a bonfire. in the picture, I am sitting on my kneecaps with a simple body, a body like a pinecone. our mother does not know about our father’s shooting. our father does not know that I know about his shooting. at night once, I was awake and heard a gunshot, imagining all of the wolves in town bloodletting. still, I stand on your back deck like molars in a mouth, trying to remember how easily a person can enter another person. you tell me it goes something like this: first through the lips, then beneath the tongue, then into the ribcage.
I know you're wrong. I know this because I can feel it in my knees like my mother can feel thunderstorms in her arthritis-ridden fingers. I correct you, tell you it is more like nuclear winter, inhaling ash and soot, lungs black like my father after a cigar. (my father and I were the same in that we both liked burning.)
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141,247 Literary Works • 674,329 Reviews
hello,
this poem is very sophisticated and complex, stirs of utter strangeness. I did enjoy reading the poem though
Hey there!
This poem evoked strange emotions, and I wasn't sure from where. I finished reading it with more questions than answers which to me is a good thing in poetry. I believe it should make you think. It shouldn't be so concrete in it's imagery it leaves no mystery to solve. Even if it's just solving what it means to myself.
This is such a great imagery.
This as well. I was able to see them immediately, standing there on the back deck. Sturdy and immobile.
Very interesting poem. It left me in quite the ambivalent state.
Hey, hello!
I really like this as an opening line! It immediately gives July a ritualistic feeling, and "tallying" makes grief feel uncomfortable and administrative, as though the narrator has repeated this process so often that loss has become something to count. The semicolon suggests the thought is about to continue, though, so the line break feels kind of awkward to me. I think either a comma or no punctuation at all might create a smoother movement into the next repetition of "every July."
"A body like a pinecone" is such a strange and memorable image. I like it! It makes the narrator seem small and closed-up, which works particularly well once you reach the references to gunfire, cigars and burning. I'm less certain about "a simple body," though. I understand the sense that this is the narrator before everything became complicated, but "simple" feels more abstract than the rest of the imagery. You might be able to make that innocence physical instead, though the pinecone comparison is already doing quite a lot of that work on its own. I want to see more of that side of the imagery, though!
This is a bit ambiguous! At first, I wasn't sure whether this meant he had been shot, had shot someone else or had been involved in a shooting more generally. Ambiguity can work here, especially in a poem so concerned with family secrecy, but this particular detail feels important enough that I wanted a firmer sense of what happened. Hm.
***
This is full of really striking images! I really like the theme of secrecy here. Everyone seems to possess a different portion of the truth, and the repetition of who knows what gives the family a sense of being held together by all the things they refuse to say aloud.
I do think the imagery in the middle gets quite dense, though. For example, there are images surrounding wolves, teeth, pinecones, and many others. I like them all individually! I just wonder if you could pick a few and strengthen them instead of having so many in close proximity to each other. I got a little lost in the narrative because I was unsure what each image was supposed to represent. Though, I do enjoy how they all build on the ending with the final admission that the narrator and father both liked burning, since that creates a very interesting connection between them all that I had not noticed before.
Thanks for sharing this poem! Cheers!
Lipton
Wow... this is another tragically beautiful piece from you that I had to process for a while after reading it earlier. I'm reading it through the lens of grief, and how grief can operate as a seasonal, recurring event rather than just a static feeling. Specific times of the year can make it feel worse.
The imagery of the speaker and their brother huddled by the bonfire feels like an emotional
anchor: a snapshot of the time before the accident.
I really had to think about this line. A pine cone is small and armoured, protected against the fall from the pine tree. But crucially, they burn. Pinecones are great at starting fires. They ignite easily and burn hot. They are kindling for a larger fire. It's also the start of something new, a seed waiting to be planted. Since this poem is an older narrator looking back, they grew from the small child by the fire to something bigger that understands more about the past.
I hope my interpretation is somewhat close to what you wanted to portray. You're a brilliant poet/writer. I'm in awe at your talent!