She will say it’s not personal and she will it’s over
But this is not that story.
We were moving, with cardboard boxes.
We could not get at it with a broom, but
there was a bird dying for three days
in the chimney. I called the landlord, he said
the bird is already dead. The bird was not
already. The bird was not dead. The bird
spent three days dying. I was finished with school
in the house for three days packing with Led
Zeppelin because of the loud. So there was that,
the three-year old, the infant, me and drowning
chimney sounds: furious, then—
pointless. It was three days, each
with a little less bird, and a fourth day with nothing.
And we left after that day. We left the day after
the nothing day—packing done
bird dead.
I will always
hate Syracuse. We will never be friends.
* * *This poem is from Kirsten's upcoming collection, a beautiful name/for a girl (Ahsahta Press).
No
Tell Motel first published it in December 2004. Back then Kirsten wrote "I have very little patience for any of my poems,
especially these—whose themes are maudlin: insomnia, death, death, death, and
juggling. But the juggling one is
actually about death, so there you go—autobiographical. I like to write about moments of
impact. Car crash, blind date,
divine vengeance . . . I also like the fabular because I think the word fabular
is lovely. I want to make my own
poems feel like the gas you might siphon from a Hummer to illegally and freely
fuel your own faerie-tale roadster.
Pert. Lip-burning. My question is—why would I equate poem
with fossil fuel? Is there
something about poetry that does not sustain itself? In my poems, what is not self-reliant translates into a
question of performance, of audience. Who did the bird die for? And how and where must I, as witness or
creator, enlarge and take such small deaths?"
We were moving, with cardboard boxes.
We could not get at it with a broom, but
there was a bird dying for three days
in the chimney. I called the landlord, he said
the bird is already dead. The bird was not
already. The bird was not dead. The bird
spent three days dying. I was finished with school
in the house for three days packing with Led
Zeppelin because of the loud. So there was that,
the three-year old, the infant, me and drowning
chimney sounds: furious, then—
pointless. It was three days, each
with a little less bird, and a fourth day with nothing.
And we left after that day. We left the day after
the nothing day—packing done
bird dead.
I will always
hate Syracuse. We will never be friends.
This poem is from Kirsten's upcoming collection, a beautiful name/for a girl (Ahsahta Press).
No Tell Motel first published it in December 2004. Back then Kirsten wrote "I have very little patience for any of my poems, especially these—whose themes are maudlin: insomnia, death, death, death, and juggling. But the juggling one is actually about death, so there you go—autobiographical. I like to write about moments of impact. Car crash, blind date, divine vengeance . . . I also like the fabular because I think the word fabular is lovely. I want to make my own poems feel like the gas you might siphon from a Hummer to illegally and freely fuel your own faerie-tale roadster. Pert. Lip-burning. My question is—why would I equate poem with fossil fuel? Is there something about poetry that does not sustain itself? In my poems, what is not self-reliant translates into a question of performance, of audience. Who did the bird die for? And how and where must I, as witness or creator, enlarge and take such small deaths?"
