Minnie Bruce Pratt: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minnie Bruce Pratt 2.20.12 photo by Leslie Feinberg

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Getting Through the Night

 

At twilight, in the fold of this day’s pall,

you lift the bed covers up, and I climb in.

 

The bed is a cave, the sheets cool as stone.

The bed is a nest we fold flesh into, belly

to back, knee to knee-fold, wrist-bone to hand.

 

Our ribs brace the bed, a boat to carry us into,

through, the little death that lives in every night.

 

I wake again at three a.m. Our cardboard boxes

sit unpacked in every room. Taxes, losses, old

dishes, death. But you still breathe beside me.

 

If I can put each thing into its place, there will be

a place for the boat to land where the clock

doesn’t tick, where the body is unlocked from pain, 

where the wood thrush sings again after the rain.

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Minnie Bruce Pratt’s poetry on being a lesbian mother, Crime Against Nature, was honored with the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book is Magnified, poems emerging from her life with trans activist and writer Leslie Feinberg. Her creative nonfiction essay, “The Queer South: Where the Past Is Not Past and the Future is Now,” was recently published in Scalawag. More information on her work can be found here.

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                                                                  Mary Pratt, The Bed, 1968

Comments

[Jack Skelley]

Beautiful and stirring -- thank you Minnie... and Terence.

[Don Berger]

"a place for the boat to land where the clock / doesn’t tick" this stunning phrase captures the world created in this lyric. Thanks for showing this to us Terence!

[Jennifer O’R]

This is very beautiful

[Grace Cavalieri]

Oh Minnie Bruce Pratt, my friend so long ago. I am transformed to read you again--
such an important part of my canon. Welcome back to my consciousness.

[lally]

so quietly impactful, poignantly precise

[Beth J.]

Taps right into my felt sense.

[Terence Winch]

Don---thanks for the comment.

[Terence Winch]

Thank you, Jack.

[Susan Campbell]

Lovely!

[Geoffrey Himes]

Nicely folded flesh.

[Clarinda]

So very beautiful and comforting. Yesterday was the 2nd anniversary of the death of Steve Davitt, love of my life. The priest read his name as “David” at his memorial mass. I was dismayed but I could hear Steve laughing out loud. Sorry to digress. Pratt’s poem speaks to my heart. Take comfort wherever you can.

[Denise Duhamel]

What a magnificent love poem! Minnie Bruce Pratt is a trailblazer--I remember reading S/he and Crimes Against Nature at a pivotal time in my own writing and they opened my eyes as to the possibilities of feminist memoir.

[Michael Whelan]

A chilling, arresting tender exploration of the complexities of intimacy

[Peter Kearney]

"This day's pall" suggests the dark cloth cover on a coffin. Can one then imagine that the bed as a boat that carries the couple through the death of each night alludes lightly to Charon's ferry on the River Styx? It is the everyday reality of the cardboard boxes and dealing with their contents that seems to turn the boat around to the peace and beauty of the concluding lines with their lovely rhyme.