If You Want to Fall in Love Again
by Traci Brimhall
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s annual Miami Book Fair preview. Every day, we’re featuring a video by a woman-identifying writer appearing at Miami Book Fair 2024. Enjoy this taste of poetry, sponsored by Miami Book Fair and SWWIM. We look forward to seeing you at the Fair!
Appearance at Miami Book Fair 2024: Traci Brimhall, Sunday, 11/24/2024, 2 pm, Room 8303
Transcript of poem Meet me in the mint field under a black umbrella. Half your memories wait there in the shallow burial of a cigar box labeled My Once and Future Homecoming. The prairie and its empire of grasses aged from green to champagne, and my pupils are useless in this biblical light. A stray wandered through the backdoor I left open. I gave it your middle name, picked it up by its neck. Ticks studded its ribs like proofless rubies. I do that a lot now, leave doors open. See how little I’ve changed? I still cover the eastern windows with masking tape X’s in every storm. Once I was in love with leaving, with wearing a dress with forty-two white buttons down the back. Now I know the German name for the counterfeit darkness you see when you close your eyes translates to own light. When I press my eyelids looking for it, red spreads its knowing stain the way the oil in our fingertips once darkened pages of hand-me-down erotica as we sucked each other’s toes. The months after you left, fantasy was a form of injury. I catalogued each What if in cursive to try and wish my way across the thin distance between faith and waiting. Truth is, I put up with your bad waltzing because it made you close enough to kiss, to push the pin in your boutonnière into your breastbone. I think I might be in love again, this time with the finch pilfering purple coneflower seeds in my garden. You loved, once, the prayer in me where a prayer shouldn’t be, the crisis with a theme. The way I kneaded breath into the shape of you. How your absence reefs my skin. How your breath once did. How you tailored your sentences to almost but not quite reach the floor. The parts of me that ache for you lately are incus, malleus, stapes. And when I whisper Come back to the scentless side of the bed you almost do, or your voice does—my heart in its bone kennel, shaking, convinced it can hear you from that far, from here, from this home I cannot live in or leave. “The river’s injury is its shape.” —Wendell Berry
Traci Brimhall’s newest book, Love Prodigal, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2024. She is also the author of 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, New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Parks Service, and is currently the Poet Laureate of Kansas.
This poem first appeared in The American Poetry Review and is forthcoming in Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon Press, November 19, 2024).
11/7 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Vandana Khanna + local writer Nicole Callihan / The Gallery at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7-8:30 pm EST / Free
Two workshops remain in our Workshop Series--SWWIM Lessons: From Prompt to Placement: “Navigating Your Manuscript with Alexandra Lytton Regalado – What I learned from reading for (and winning) the National Poetry Series” on 11/12 (register here) and “Surfing Submittable with Jen Karetnick – Keeping your head above water in the poetry submissions process” on 12/10 (register here). Price: $80/workshop. Time: 7:00–9:00 PM (EST). Where: Zoom.
Note: SWWIM Every Day is now accepting poetry translations for publication consideration. Please see swwim.org/submit for the full guidelines.
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