October 6 Reading: Mariah's Pick

Susanna Childress will be reading at Beaverdale Books on Thursday, October 6th at 7pm.  Here is a poem from her new book Entering the House of Awe.

Torn

            Recently a friend admitted his fear of birds, how

                        as a child he’d meant to rescue a fallen robin,

                                                                                                  had reached up

to return the bird when a grey sprawl of lice

                                                                        left its body

            and scattered on his hand, so he dropped the bird and ran.

                                                                                                          It made me

                                    think of you, the way a grown man relives

his ancient anxieties more vividly with time—that field

                        of sorghum stretching before my friend

                                                                                      like the rest of his life, each

white cedar humming under its scabs of bark,

                                                                       branches promising

            oriel, blackbird, grackle as he flapped the lice from his arm.

                                                                                                         It may

                    be true, that even the smallest deaths are mother

to beauty, but you spared your children stories of their grandparents launching

        plates at each other, of LA gang fights,

                                                                     you traded your buddy’s

        blown-off face in Nha Trang for the kneaded silence of its truth

                        beneath your red red sangre:

                                                                    you knew what it was to fear,

                                                                                                                you let me

        believe man is good, the four chambers of the heart

                     more like a cow’s prodigious stomachs than the cavities

of a pistol.

                I crawled beneath your knees to watch

                        cop shows on TV,

                                                     hollered my long midnights

when the closet kicked with deer,

                                                    the woman’s ears bled bees,

                                                                                                the neighbor boy

            clamped his penis against my cheekbone at someone’s

                         birthday while upstairs they pinned the tail on the donkey—

green and blue balloons floated down, popped

                                                                        at his elbows. My friend says,

A bird’s most terrifying

                                    feature is its tongue—blanched, cracked—think of it

            coming straight for your face.

                                    I mean to laugh

            a little, his arms raised, fingers aimed at my eyes

like claws.

                Instead I hear myself gasp, as though I could begin

              to understand this, his personal horror.

                                                                         I cannot. I think

           

              of Philomela—human turned nightingale

                        whose tongue, torn ragged like the kitchen curtain,

continued to sing.

                           Papi, how could you know that balloons,

                                                                                          to this day, loose

            my bowels? I never told you.

                                                         I swore it was a dream.