At first a rumble, then thunder cracks apart the morning and suddenly I remember half-waking last night to a heron shrieking as a coyote made a meal of stilts and feathers— though in my stupor, I misheard it as drunken boys yelling Hooray! slowly over and over again, as if death was jubilant with a broken singing in her mouth. Now lightning welds four forks of vanishing into a sky that has, overnight, lost a bit of winged blue. When we are lucky, we forget peril’s appetite. But the August my daughter labored to bring her first child here, a force and counterforce wrestled in the mystery of her body and its absence still occupying mine. Today the marsh steams, brightening green. And there, further out along the brambled roadside, I remember last summer, how blackberries scattered behind a trio of women as they carried their overfilled buckets home. And I remember writing then, This baby will destroy the whole of her. I should know. Speak to me of love and I’ll answer ruin begins as a brimming sweetness, threatening to spill.
Julia B. Levine’s recent awards include the Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU, 2014), a 2022 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the American Academy of Poetry, and first prize from the Bellevue Literary Review, the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, and Tiferet. Currently her work is appearing in Terrain, The Night Heron Barks, Blackbird, and The Southern Review. Her most recent collection is Ordinary Psalms (LSU Press, 2021).
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Just love this.
This is shatteringly lovely. Thank you.