When wispy clouds drift through sparsely wooded mountains
By Martha Silano
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
When the contours of mountains resemble coliseums. Cathedrality of mountains. Relief of roadlessness. That there are lakes impossible to reach by car. That from this window just behind the wing, 20F, there are no signs of life. Once I packed a bag with cheddar goldfish. Once my son threw up before we even boarded the plane. Cracks and fissures, cuneiform of rock. Backbones and capillaries, the snaking green edged with bluffs (long-ago ocean?). He will turn eighteen next week. Brain-like contours—cerebral cortex or cerebellum? Contours thin like the veins of leaves, fronds of a sword fern, feet of a coot. Time passed like a silent rail in the reeds. The folds very Egyptian, mummies reposed in their tombs. Like an alligator’s enormous tail, though lacking snout and teeth. Once I sang La crocodile il est malade, il est malade a Singapour. All those years, I thought I was singing sangue a peu—a little blood. Clouds less cumulus, more cumulonimbus. Towns scattered with houses like paint chips. From the ground he would wave to the passengers in the sky: Bye-bye, babies! Claw-like hills, afghan of cloud not like fresh snow but snow a few days old, the occasional indentation where a foot or tire met asphalt. The crocodile is sick. A little mercy, a little blood. Between fluffy swirls, black holes. When the binky and the sippy cup. When the diaper bag and the teething ring. Cottoned from above like first tracks on Lynx Pass, a pristine path through aspen, lodgepole, spruce.
Martha Silano has authored seven poetry books, including The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award finalist, and most recently, This One We Call Ours, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize. Acre Books will release Terminal Surreal, her book about living with ALS, in September 2025. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Paris Review, AGNI, North American Review, American Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review Online, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Her poem "Love" appears in The Best American Poetry 2009.
12/12 / Poetry Reading and Conversation with visiting poet-in-residence Nicole Cooley + local writer Caroline Cabrera / 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
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