Poetry / Autumn McClintock
:: Abiding Characteristics ::
erased from Valerie’s journal: April 21, 1982
With each season
you stand the elusive
reason for why people “pass on.”
you learn to pick tulips
long-stemmed instead of right
from the blossom. Listening
a glimpse
you handle relationships
Know how special you are. You’re just not
you’re not you’re
not you’re not
so beautiful
the seasons
You unlearn
and accept
understand
something
spoken of and obvious
you say, “get it, mom?”
if you could
get around to the other side it would be
easier
you love to run.
:: Isaiah 40: Erased from Headstone ::
says your God
her hard service has been completed,
she has received from the LORD’S hand
the wilderness the desert
a highway rough
and revealed.
And I said, What shall I cry? All people are grass,
and all breath
blows the grass.
a high mountain lift up
with a shout,
lift up
the hollow breadth of the heavens
Who has held the earth in a basket?
Whom did the LORD consult
and who was
the
dust the
fine dust
Do you not know? Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you
since the earth was
the earth,
its grass
stretches
like a canopy,
and reduces this world to
the ground
the name
is missing.
Why do you complain?
Why do you say
LORD my God
LORD God,
no
LORD
no
no.
From the writer
:: Account ::
These erasures are, respectively, from a journal my mother wrote to/for me after I was born and from chapter 40 of Isaiah, from the New International Version of the Bible. This year, I am the age my mother was when she died: 41. This project allows our conversation to go on. These works are also part of a longer manuscript that examines relationships between/among women, illness, grief, entering middle age, and what it means to outlive one’s parent in years and age. My hope is that the poems make possible other conversations out in the world, between you and your dead or maybe even you and your living. Works of erasure that have been invaluable as I approached this project are The Ground I Stand on Is Not My Ground by Collier Nogues, Radi os by Ronald Johnson, and Voyager by Srikanth Reddy.
Autumn McClintock lives in Philadelphia and works at the public library. Her first chapbook, After the Creek, was published in 2016. Poems of hers have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Daily, Green Mountains Review, Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. She is a staff reader for Ploughshares.