by Sara Fetherfolf
I’ll sing you countdown:
juke, fluorescent drone, hinge
of a gate rasping open.
I’ll sing you Lake Michigan’s
pop & flush, melting; Good
Morning America jingle
& the shantung scratch
of my mother’s penciled
To Do list. Sing a flooded street
one spring & its brass
refraction, as a catfish,
big as a grown man’s foot,
swims by. Mirror, prism, molecule
of water bending & blotting,
betrothal of soot & ozone,
4 heartbeats
between lightning & thunder
for each mile distance:
sing you this; sing you mirror
rattling like teeth
against its hanging
when the thunder hits, mirror
inherited from my mother
who inherited it
from the beech tree
cut down to make its frame.
I’ll sing you the backside:
beech-woman, combing
her fresh-washed hair
in the mirror inherited
from all the before;
sing you the 2 weeks
I spent transformed
into a catfish at age 19,
inhaling through my knife-slice
gills; sing that form in which I held
a forgiveness that could sever
like lightning,
the sound of my time
unmothered & numbered, pealing from
me, 19,
thumbing down a gravel
dead end off Rt. 78; 19, Pennsylvania,
storm-touched land
unplanted & breathless
in the afterfloods.
Sing mud & beg
& juke & echo—gunshot
resounding off another
mountain, storm-touched,
4 heartbeats, footfall
as the woman in the beech mirror walks
up the underworld stairway
once more into
this my flashpaper place
hot for the going.
Sing of it: flood, shape-shift,
too much rain
or not enough; sing of
her, of me, broke free,
back home, kneeling
in the light & mud to write
a To Do list:
- brood on keepsakes drowned or gone missing
- moon & moon & what could grow here
This poem originally appeared in Via Combusta (New American Press, 2022), Sara’s new poetry collection.
