only ones that were wide open.
My Mother’s Lungs—began their
dying sometime in the past. Doctors
talked around tombstones. About the
hedges near the tombstones, the font.
The obituary writer said the obituary is
the moment when someone becomes
history. What if my mother never told
me stories about the war or about her
childhood? Does that mean none of
it happened? No one sits next to my
mother’s small rectangular tombstone,
flush to the earth. The stone is meant
to be read from above. What if I’m in
space and can’t read it? Does that
mean she didn’t die? She died at
7:07 a.m. PST. It is three hours earlier
in Hawaii. Does that mean in Hawaii
she hasn’t died yet? But the plane
ride to Hawaii is five hours long. This
time gap can never be overcome. The
difference is called grieving.
Tears—died on August 3, 2016. Once
we stopped at a Vons to pick up
flowers and pinwheels on our way to
the graveyard. It had been a year and
death no longer glittered. My ten-year-
old putting the flowers perfectly in the
small narrow hole in front of the stone.
How she somehow knew what the hole
was for, that my mother wasn’t really on
the other side. Suddenly, our sobbing.
How many times have I looked into the
sky for some kind of message, only to
find content but no form. She ran back
to the car. The way grief takes many
forms, as tears or pinwheels. The way
the word haystack never conjures up
the same image twice. The way we
assume all tears taste the same. The
way our sadness is plural, but grief is
singular.
Appetite—died on March 16, 2015.
Once, in graduate school, I was
the only one to order a drink at the
restaurant. My boyfriend did not like
this. He dropped me off in the middle
of town to walk home. I looked at
the children’s clothing in the window,
the little striped cap, pink dress, and
thought about beauty. I spun around
to avoid darkness but darkness was
the one spinning me. I hid in a bright
Taco Bell. The man at the register
had a narrow hole for a mouth and a
brown mass on his cheek. He was
so beautiful that I thought he must be
Death. Twenty years later, my mother
requested Taco Bell for lunch. I ran out
to buy her bags and bags of tacos. No
one in line understood my emergency.
The man I handed my credit card to
had a brown mass on his face. He
nodded when he handed me the bag,
as if he knew. My mother pressed her
lips to the tacos, as if she were kissing
someone for the rapturous last time.
Form—died on August 3, 2015. My
children sleep with framed photos of my
mother. Leaden, angular, metal frames.
My ten-year-old puts her frame in the
red velvet bag that held the cremation
urn and brings it with her on vacation.
A photo of my mother sits in the bag
that once held a container of her ashes.
When we die, we are represented by
representations of representations,
often in different forms. Memories
too are representations of the dead.
I go through corridors looking for the
original but can’t find her. In Palm
Springs, the desert fails me. Dust,
sand, gravel, bits of dead things
everywhere, a speck of someone
else’s dead mother blows into my eye
and I start crying again. The heat is
now too optimistic. The pool and
its luster like an inquisition. My own
breathing, between the splashes and
children laughing, no longer a miracle,
but simple mathematics.
Valzhyna Mort
Music for the Dead and Resurrected
“Here, history comes to an end / like a movie / with rolling credits of headstones,” writes Valzhyna Mort, though the history doesn’t end but takes deep and memorable residence in the music of these poems. The collection offers many different kinds of poetry: from elegies to protest poems to moments of lyric intimacy. But in all of them there’s an unmistakable emotion embodied in craft, one that continues to echo in our minds long after we finish the book. And this is perhaps the reason why Mort’s striking pages about Belarus are ultimately poems about all of us: they set our remembering and our grief to inimitable music.
Genesis
I’ve always preferred Cain.
* * *
His angry
loneliness, his
lack of mother’s
love, his Christian
sarcasm: “Am I
my brother’s keeper?”
asks his brother’s murderer.
* * *
Aren’t we indeed
the keepers of our dead?
* * *
Let me start again:
* * *
I prefer apples that roll
far from the tree.
* * *
Dry like a twig
is umbilical cord, tucked between legs.
* * *
How did they cut it, Cain? With
a stone?
* * *
Under Criminal Record
write, “Mother, home.”
Under Weapon
write, “Mother, home.”
Washday
Amelia does her washing by the wall
so bare you’d think she shaved it.
* * *
The window’s open, anyone can see.
Soap hisses. An air-raid warning rings
like a telephone from the future.
Her dress is nailed to the laundry line.
* * *
From this gray garment, that is either guarding
or attacking the house, three yards of darkness
fall across the floorboards. She stands inside,
as at the bottom of a river, her heart an octopus.
* * *
Her hands so big, next to them,
her head is a small o
(the neighbors squint),
* * *
stuffed hungrily with stubborn hair.
New Year in Vishnyowka
(A Lullaby)
Snow glints and softens
a pig’s slaughter.
* * *
Mama refuses another
drink, mama
agrees to another drink.
* * *
On the wall—a carpet with peonies,
their purple mouths
suck me into sleep.
Small,
I’ve been bedded.
Toasts
from across the wall,
my lullabies.
Mama says no-no-no
to more drink.
* * *
My bed smells of valenky.
Without taking its eyes off me
a cat
licks its gray paw as if sharpening a knife.
Mama yells yes to another drink.
* * *
Mama’s breasts are
too big to fit into packed morning buses.
There’s uncertainty
I would grow into a real person.
But on a certain day
in Vishnyowka,
a pig
is slaughtered, mama whispers yes
yes yes yes
to more drink,
I’m vanishing into the peonies’ throats,
peonies smell of valenky,
of pig’s blood
on the snow.
* * *
* * *
Clock’s hands leave a strange ski track.
A Song for a Raised Voice and a Screwdriver
Having climbed into my lap, the accordion
composes
its heavy breathing.
Who
turned Gregor Samsa
into this black box? The old man
* * *
who taught me to play accordion banged
a screwdriver on a school desk.
For what?
For a beat!
* * *
He wore thick glasses, with lenses yellowed like toenails.
Ex-soldier, he had war medals and no rhythm.
* * *
Stepanych, you banged the accordion buttons
like a man stuck in an elevator.
* * *
I limped
across the keys
following the promise of the screwdriver.
* * *
Listen to me now missing the beat as if dodging
rubber bullets, Stepanych, I’m your student
* * *
to the bone. Stepanych, I’m
a bone snatched
by the giant spider
of an accordion, stretching its leggy belts
over my back.
* * *
“His strange heart beating next to mine” and yada yada.
* * *
I imagine you buried with that screwdriver
like with a scepter—an emperor,
Stepanych the Pitchless.
* * *
Your student places her accordion like an ancestral
altar
on an empty chair.
* * *
Children, we learned rhythm
from the piss-stained hiccup of elevators,
from the broken blinking of traffic lights.
* * *
I’m barricaded behind a sob.
* * *
Give me that screwdriver beat, Stepanych,
and I’ll be off.
Nocturne for a Moving Train
The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window
of a night train were
the saddest trees.
* * *
They seemed about to speak,
then—
vanished like soldiers.
* * *
The hostess handed out starched linens for sleep.
Passengers bent over small icons
of sandwiches.
* * *
In a tall glass, a spoon mixed sugar into coffee
banging its silver face against the facets.
* * *
The window reflected back a figure
struggling with white sheets.
* * *
The posts with names of towns promised
a possibility of words
for what flew by.
* * *
In lit-up windows people seemed to move
as if performing surgery on tables.
* * *
Chestnut parks sighed the sighs of creatures
capable of speech.
* * *
Radiation, an etymology of soil
* * *
directed into the future, prepared
a thesis on the new origins of old roots,
on secret, disfiguring missions of misspellings,
on the shocking betrayal of apples,
on the uncompromised loyalty of cesium.
* * *
My childish voice, my hands, my feet—all my things that live
on the edges of me—
shhh now, the chestnut parks are about to speak.
* * *
But now they’ve vanished.
* * *
I was extracted from my apartment block,
chained to the earth with iron playgrounds,
where iron swings rose like oil wells,
* * *
I was extracted before I could dig a language
out of air
with my childish feet.
* * *
I was extracted by beaks—storks, cranes.
* * *
See the conductor punching out eyes
of sleeping passengers.
What is it about my face
that turns it into a document,
into a ticket stretched out by a neck?
* * *
Why does unfolding this starched bedding
feel like
skinning someone invisible?
Why can’t the spoons, head-down in glasses, stop screaming?
* * *
Shhh . . .
* * *
The chestnuts are about to speak.
Srikanth Reddy
Underworld Lit
Seldom does a poetry book question its limits as intriguingly and inventively as Underworld Lit. Seriousness and laughter, academic boredom and surreal tour de force, precision and playfulness, the living and the dead move unusually closely in this book. A multiverse, a few novels packed in one poetry collection, a delightful and ironic autobiography of a university professor of literature, a book full of disturbingly poetic moments and ironic quizzes, a guided tour to hell. Beautifully balanced and elegantly wild, this prose epic takes us where we truly belong — to the unknown. Reddy — like Dante — knows: If we want to say anything relevant about our world, we have to embark first on a profound tour of the underworld.
V
I promised my wife that I would call Dr. Song today. After put-
ting Mira down for her nap and slipping outside for a smoke, I
lifted the receiver. The sound it emitted, which I have heard with-
out pause countless times before, seemed to me otherworldly
now, like somebody’s finger playing on the wet rim of a crystal
bowl in a derelict theater before the wars.
* * *
It’s hard to say how long I stood there listening. It may have
been seconds or seasons. The rings of Saturn kept turning in
their groove. For reasons beyond me—our seminar had already
moved on from late medieval Europe to developing world un-
derworlds—I dialed 1-800-INFERNO, and before the first ring, a
woman’s voice answered in heavily accented English.
* * *
“Is it you?”
* * *
“I think so,” I replied. Outside, the honey locusts sprinkled their
pale spinning leaves in real time. Focusing on one as it fell
seemed to slow the general descent.
* * *
“Oh creature, gracious and good,” the faraway lady recited, as if
reading, against her will, from a prepared text, “traversing the
dusky element to visit us / who stained the world with blood.” I
could hear rain trickling in a gutter spout on the other end of
the line.
* * *
“Please,” I said into the receiver, “remove my name from your
list.”
VI
While outlining the requirements for our first critical essay of
the term, I notice a h
and rising in world-historical time at the
back of the classroom.
* * *
“What if I’m ideologically opposed to revision?” asks the red-
headed boy in a “New Slaves” T-shirt.
* * *
A city bus unloads its pageantry outside the window. A handful
of sparrows erupts from the equestrian statue on the quad. I re-
member Sun Tzu’s advice to humanities instructors, which I re-
view on index cards at the outset of each academic quarter.
* * *
Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.
* * *
“What exactly is your ideology?” I ask, stroking my beard.
* * *
“I’m a Zen Naxalite crypto-Objectivist,” replies my interlocutor.
“How about you?”
* * *
I have no choice but to improvise. “Pro-recycling, anti-geno-
The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology Page 2
