1) Here is a memory: I walk five miles deep into the woods in the back of the yellow house with my brother so that we can watch the flies circle around the bodies of the dead cows, their hanging limbs, their loose tongues. The air hangs like a girl's arms around my shoulders. My brother and I both wear shorts.
2) Inventory: one tractor in the yard, one truck in the driveway. There is one driveway, gravely like the throats of my father and grandfather. They both live in the yellow house. At night, I stay up late listening to their screams. They sound like owls’ heads, or hurricanes.
3) Driving to your house, the trees start to look like my old baby teeth and my skin starts to feel like the bruises of a mother I have not spoken to in three years. There, people sit in their striped foldout beach chairs in the parking lots of gas stations and watch the cars go by, the women wearing dresses covered in flowers that swell like skeletons down to their ankles. You tell me when the dogs bark, they sound like stretched out skies.
4) I imagine the sky as the Red Sea. We go to synagogue every Friday evening. The pews press against the back of my sticky legs and trousers. You eye me from across the aisle, and I do my best to focus on the head in front of mine.
5) We are driving across this bridge the way wolves move through hills. I am too afraid to ask you to stop here, too afraid to look up and hold the moon's light in the back of my throat, also too afraid to look down at the river. I know what the river looks like already: as ashed as my mother's hands the night I was born.
6) I am trying to drive for you across this bridge, across this highway. My feet and hands are no more than wheels.
7) You keep asking me about my hometown. I tell you, then: there were fish in the river, there must have been. Once, my brother and I stood knee-deep in July and watched something silver turn beneath us.
8) I’ve never seen either of my parents swim in the river, but I can hear them screaming, at night, about me, mostly, sounding like whorls of fingerprints being rubbed together in the wrong direction. My body is so often being rubbed together in the wrong direction: a stomach that feels like tadpoles or eggs boiled incorrectly, too soft or too hard. My stomach growls, often. It tightens, often, too.
9) I tell you that I was not born to new parents; sometimes, I think this is the first mistake I ever made.
10) I never loved you more than I did on my porch for the first time, you standing there looking gaunt and as saintly as a bruise, me with hunched shoulders. I couldn’t stop shaking. I never stopped shaking. Here I am in this car, and it is air-conditioned, and I am still shaking.
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sure, this is a birthday poem // some facts about the body: the liver can grow itself back, hair keeps no record of pain, the tongue heals quickly because the mouth is extravagant with blood, you get older. much, much older.
Hey there!!
This is absolutely beautiful. There were so many little turns of phrase that took my breath away - too many to pick out all of them, but I definitely want to shout-out as many as I can!
I will say, though, that the first 3 stanzas are considerably weaker than the rest of the poem - to the point that I would consider cutting them entirely. (You could totally rework them into a whole other poem!) By number 4, you've very clearly hit a rhythm and figured out what the poem needs to be, and I personally think it makes for a far stronger start than number 1. You also establish a pattern in the first two stanzas - starting with an introductory phrase and a colon - that has fully disappeared by stanza three, which I think contributes to that wider feeling of them being a warm-up to the meat of the poem.
Also this phrasing feels counter-intuitive to me, I feel it should be 'at the back of'. Unless you're aiming for the woods being inside the house!
I like the images you're putting together here, but I'm not sure they're really meshing. I am unclear on how the trees might look like old baby teeth, or what that might say about the trees. This is my other top-level criticism: I think you're over-relying on similes. They are, for the most part, REALLY good similes, but there are several like this one where I'm not sure the simile is doing much work. I also think you're using them as a bit of a crutch, and your work may benefit from temporarily banning yourself from using them, so you can develop other muscles!
As I said before: this is where the poem really comes to life, for me. This is just stunning. It's so sensory and yet so concise, and it gives me such a powerful feeling of longing and melancholy and tension. Every sentence builds on the last perfectly.
Another absolutely BEAUTIFUL sentence. Come to think of it, all my favourite parts of this poem do not include similes at all, and I don't think that's a coincidence!
I feel like I have been punched in the gut and I mean this in the most complimentary way possible.
Thank you so much for sharing your work with us.
huge, huge thanks! I think a lot of my imagery is just free association - I like to bounce around from idea to idea (and not really revise much). though, I totally get your point about the similes! I'll be sure to keep that in mind for revision!