Praise the nerves, praise the nervous–
the child in first grade afraid for no good reason,
in her hunch ten thousand
thousand buzzing bones: her dear strangers’
spindles and axes, dear strangers’
blood rising from under her buttons, recognizing
the threat, the hidden blood
in an alien hall white with others. At home, years
on, those winter nights: a caw, a synapse–sign
in the radio static. The hands that knew
to flash freeze to the pencil
when her father brought his bag into the hall.
Does a cymbal in the knee remember
pogroms or famine, names for the wheat
or the fist? Did the skin over the neck go cold
from the page of angels on the ladder?
When the doctor told my mother and father the pills
would help me forget to panic, they did not want me
to take the pills. They did not want me to forget. Praise
the gaps inside our bottom teeth, praise the choke
of gulls who fill them, the dirty caws glued
to our breath. Praise cranial, spinal, vagus: the stars
that rush across the skin’s midwinter trees, past
feet singing high in the swings, to reach us.
Give thanks for the ruthless ghosts
buried under our coats. For the radio
cracked inside me, its static the snow-bees
that wild me here, that keep me. How their ice wings save
and deceive. For the child in first grade, praise
the way their love swarms reason. Stings. Their devout
confusion. Praise their nerve.
Sally Rosen Kindred
Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of three poetry collections: No Eden and Book of Asters, both from Mayapple Press, and Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Diode Book Prize and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Pleiades, The Greensboro Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online.
