Ode to the Bone China Sugar Bowl
In the new world, the windowsills fill with arugula,
romaine, and buttercrunch. I don’t know what microgreens
are, but I grow them. I want to be kind to my body.
Rain refills the aquifers, ducks glide undaunted
by fenced dogs. Mountains rise like Saturn’s rings
in another atmosphere. We praise lost snow packs.
Oh bluest sky! Oh smogless cities! In the new world,
the minnows school through the clean canals.
Dandelions gasp from every crack, oh edible gold!
My desire’s clean as a leaf, trembling in the afternoon sun.
My tired body rests because I let it. Do you hear
the piano’s spine, the family’s silent walking?
The new world empties itself into stone, an ocean
takes back the prairie from history. All the fossils
wake and burble, stretching their stiff spines.
Soaked in moonlight, the bones howl. The moon
duplicates herself, light tunnels wake the underland
forests. I am a grainless grain, a shadow daughter.
I bury the demitasse spoon in the sugar bowl made
of bone — crushed, heated, remade — the sweetness
becomes the sip, the first taste of the new world.
ξ
Shelter Ghazal
Morning rises like an obelisk. Where does stone find shelter?
The girl I remember plays in her father’s garden, a shelter.
Clouds opal the morning, bees make the phlox tremble, sparrows
sing in me as if I were a redbud, as if my arms were shelter.
The ash trees and orange blossoms stand still in midday sun.
Without you, I feel closer to my body’s pain. Absence shelters.
Wet nose on my arm wakes me, the dog’s metronome of joy
beats the walls. Only yesterday, the howl chorus of the shelter.
Have you forgotten the magma, churning at the Earth’s core?
The animal in us? Rain wakes the sweet bays, the sky shelters.
Like the snail but not the slug, not the opossum but the armadillo
or the turtle's famous comforts, sometimes the body is a shelter.
Early evening, the sun in its thin gray veil. Dog asleep on the sofa,
all bellies full. My mind’s skull-bone: an uncracked shetler.
ξ
Starlight from the Old Century
To make room, the dream
opens, a broken window.
Even sleeping, masks.
Night incubates the heart’s fears.
Soundless winds enter bodies.
Dark morning of song
and snore, the day slow and gray.
New quiet once more.
In the dream, we are seasons.
We eat the salty day, sing
songs with no vowels
stolen from the scold of jaws,
bossy squawk and mine.
Droplet songs and songs without
sunlight, fellow citizens.
Salute the sparrow.
Praise the chickadee’s key change.
There’s still a refrain.
Something about patience or
spring or wilding the waters.
The Earth tilts, moving
mercury to summer heights
and ice down rivers.
Will heat slow the kill? We wait.
We bow to bowls of tea leaves.
The dregs make futures
with ice cream, harvests, and snow.
The will and the verb.
The screaming kettle. Birds flock
straight into glass, more omens.
If disaster means
bad star, if apocalypse
means unveil, let's play.
Let’s walk like children into
summer snow, into spring fires.
ξ
Traci Brimhall is the author of four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press), Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry. She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.
Brynn Saito is the author of two books of poetry from Red Hen Press, Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She recently authored the chapbook, Dear—, commissioned by Densho, an organization dedicated to sharing the story of the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans. Brynn is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at Fresno State and co-director of Yonsei Memory Project.