The French Horn
By Jessica Cuello
What if your name is not yours but the absent father, a stranger written on your worksheet, a glyph on your face carried through the halls of West Street Elementary where the teachers gaze out the great glass doors longingly, perpetual pale light at either end, and you carry a giant French Horn, the school’s horn on loan, its swirl a beautiful coil of gold opening like a bell and it calls to you though it is heavy bigger than you and you stop every block to rest to change hands and deep inside the case the dark velvet form holds the instrument and you are quiet as survival walking dreamlike past the crossing guard on a street you think of as your journey because you walk alone and everything that happens to you happens on this route between name and apartment, the grey one that leans sideways and gets Condemned in a pale paper pasted over a window and when you live there you listen through the walls, your whole body an ear, and though you quit later because you have the wrong embouchure and don’t practice enough, the horn glints behind your shoulder in silent wait.
Jessica Cuello’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book, Liar, was selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize. Cuello is the recipient of a 2023 NYSCA Artist Grant and is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review. She teaches French in Central NY.
04/10 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Chloe Martinez and local poet Ximena Gómez / The BBar 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
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Just brilliant, as always.
Lovely and touching.