Charlotte Boulay: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Pallikoodam

 

When it rained, even our shoes

turned green. The fan whirred

except when the power was out,

then we read by candlelight under

the mosquito net, or didn’t:

I feared it going up

around us, a fuzz of flame.

We lived with animals: small lizards

darting up the walls, lines of tiny,

imperious ants. Every night

we tried to trap the rat

in the rafters, baiting him with banana

until finally we awoke to a

snap. We had a small television

and we watched old sitcoms, new

pop videos, the twin towers falling

again and again. They said over

and over that nothing would be

the same after that, and for once

they were right. We ate chocolate bars

for their sweet familiarity, and we lined

books neatly on the shelves. We slept

holding each other and woke in the mornings

to hear someone singing, softly,

as she swept the yard clean.

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Charlotte Boulay’s first book of poems, Foxes on the Trampoline, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2014. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Boston Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. She lives in Philadelphia and works at The Miquon School as both a fundraiser and COVID prevention specialist.

*note: The word pallikoodam means “school” in Malayalam, the language of Kerala, India.

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                                      Ernst Stuckelberg, The Girl with the Lizard, oil on canvas, 2019

Comments

[Indran Amirthanayagam]

Pallikoodam must be somewhere on the Southern Indian coast, near Chennai perhaps. Your poem brings me to that landscape which I knew shortly after the Towers fell, a new life for me then and yes, for once they were right. But your beautiful, restorative poem rebuilds a place with fine details, the rat in the rafter snapped. Thank you for the trip back.

Take Care

Indran Amirthanayagam
Editor, The Beltway Poetry Quarterly (www.beltwaypoetry.com). Do send us some poems, to [email protected]

[Barbara Henning]

Beautiful childhood memory. Thank you.

[Grace Cavalieri]

The body does not lie, for I have chills. The sweet beauty, and yet the rat. How brilliant. I'm sure her poetry could prevent Covid.
AND! happy to meet her.

[Don Berger]

I very much appreciate this poem's clarity and authentic voice--it manages very well to be autobiographical without straining too much for any distractingly fake lyric antics--in other words, it's not overly wrought, and in my friend's general words on the hyper-poetic, "hasn't spent too much time on the treadmill in the gym." A narrative like this one makes life richer.

[lally]

beautifully done

[april havoc]

Great title and then some.

[Mary Louise Kiernan]

Thank you for widening my world of poetry with your posts of these links!

Charlotte Boulay: Pick of the Week "Pallikoodam"

"A Song to a Child at Night-time" [Poem by Dylan Thomas, an @Ednaschoice Selection]

I will follow Edna and her Instagram posts! https://www.instagram.com/ednaschoice/?hl=en

[David Lehman]

Nice use of third-person singular in the poem. Favorite lines: "Every night / we tried to trap the rat / in the rafter." Kudos.

[Clarinda]

The tone combining wonder and matter of fact/ness is perfect. Thank you for this trip to another time (not very distant) and another place (very distant) is pitch perfect.

[David Schloss]

Wonderful evocation of a place and a time: a poem of real experience.