Poetry / Traci Brimhall
:: WHAT WOULD I DO IF YOU RETURNED AS A CARDINAL? ::
The light threading through morning’s confusion isn’t you. The surprised penny isn’t you either. Hornet at the hummingbird feeder devastates like wildfires or narrative. Hunger for signs doesn’t bring any. The spiritual equity of the monarch is still a fortune written for someone else’s hope. Sometimes God is mysterious, and sometimes God is a knife, an artery rushing to greet the air. Your fear fostered so much of my suffering. My childhood a revision of yours. The alpine adolescence— a cosmetology of fireweed, aster, buttercup. I pruned your roses, massacre of red flags bloodying the ivy. God rejected me for my own good. I trespassed into the matador’s closet for the secrets, but I was as alone as a medium in a haunted house, quiet as what remains of your body. In the mirror, you and not you. My hair straighter, thinner. Though I still can’t control it, I care for it. The quilt you never made but the music you did, your manicure clicking across piano keys. The comfort of unhealthy patterns blushing harder than rubies. I would do what I couldn’t as a child and turn from you.
:: BODY, REMEMBER ::
Wake up, nerves. Remember touch, breath, touch. Oh body, remember those mouths, those hands, how you desired all of it, especially blindfolded. The best of everything has been love, those pounds of joy. Forget toes stubbed on bed edges, bike pedals hitting shins, joints sugar-swollen and complaining. Remember the infant doppler looping lemniscates over your torso, listening for the baby but finding the native darkness of your interior, blood rushing like horses galloping underwater? And remember those pop songs you danced to in darkened kitchens so passing cars couldn’t see your hips’s enthusiasm for a good bass line? Remember last night—the car’s engine bragging its speed, shaking the marrow of each bone? You were alive with a great rage, monstrous and capable. But don’t worry, you were only an animal. One day you’ll get to die like everything you admire, and your beloved will forget your face. Remember it is not because he failed to love you well, but because his brain doesn’t hold faces. Your brain will hold so little then, too, so you can become what’s next. It will be beautiful, body, your cells undressing, forgetting. And over legs you endlessly shaved, grasses will grow like you—eager, wild, surviving every day they can.
From the writer
:: Account ::
Both of these poems were written while spending time with one of my best friends, the poet Brynn Saito. For the last (almost) 20 years she and I have written together. After our MFA, we traveled together most summers and wrote together, and even if sometimes we are just traveling to each other’s homes, we continue to write together almost every day we’re together. We walk our dogs together, make tea, pull some tarot cards, and give each other prompts. Both of these pieces were written in Colorado, where we currently spend time together in the summer. My book Love Prodigal contains many love poems—love as a romantic partner, love as a parent for a child, love as a child for a difficult parent, but only one poem explicitly about the love of friends. Which is a shame because the love of my friends has been some of the most supportive and sustaining of my life and how I learned a lot about what love should look like. But beneath the clear subjects of the love poems in the book is the love of my friends who write with me, who laugh with me, who talk deeply with me, who keep me in love with my own life.
Traci Brimhall is a professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Love Prodigal (published November 2024 by Copper Canyon). Her poems have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, the National Parks Service, the Academy of American Poets, and Purdue Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She’s the current poet laureate for the State of Kansas.