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Literary magazine. |
 Kirsten Rian
Kirsten Rian's poetry has appeared in numerous international literary journals and anthologies, and was recently nominated for inclusion in the 2008 Best New Poets anthology. She leads workshops and classes regionally as well as internationally, including locations like Sierra Leone
how sound travels inside her, they tell me, it is quiet,
more still than a pond
in south Vietnam at midnight.
red letters spell thank you
on a plastic grocery bag,
thank you, she points
in jagged gestures to the words
she can’t speak, thank you.
and I have done nothing
except show up
and sit at the table
and watch her point
to the poster on the wall,
the waterfall, cascading down,
wishing it would spill across the table,
the roar so deafening
it would shudder us,
the reverberations of sound, at least.
she brings me newspaper clippings
of her niece’s recital,
flips over the poetry book and points
to the picture of her father on the back,
rubs my shoulder, pokes again
at the plastic bag with the red letters,
thank you. she brings the calendar
points to various dates, stretches her arms up
and points to the hanging birthday banner,
her sister’s, brother’s, father’s birthdays.
she brings a photo of her other niece,
the one who died at 13 of a brain tumor,
and from the kitchen,
two boxes of crackerjack and a can
of mango juice, she places them
in the bag, smiles,
points to me, to the bag, to me,
to the words, thank you.
she wants to walk me to my car,
grabs my arm, holds me back
until traffic passes, looks up,
pats my arm, smiles, looks up,
opens my door, waves, watches me go,
looks up, heads back inside.
tomorrow her sister will go to work,
she will be home, inside,
watching a tv she can’t hear,
she will look out the window.
she never learned to read or write.
she must be my age, or thereabouts.
so we point, we smile,
for an hour I smile so hard my face hurts,
and my thoughts hurt so much I cry
as I pull away, I am still smiling though
in case she is watching. I want to bring
her paints, I can’t believe she has no paints,
something of her own to point at, to look at,
to put on the walls where there are no windows,
because sometimes red is a cello,
sometimes blue is a crow caw,
sometimes green echoes,
sometimes orange is shuffling feet on concrete,
and sometimes black is just quiet,
and maybe they could be quiet together,
along with lavender, and brown, and grey hours
stacking like bricks and days and smiles,
stacking like all we’ve got,
like all we’ll ever have, all we hold onto,
all we let go, all we make do with,
all we see, all we hear, all we are.
all we are.
Editor's Note [Nov 3, 2008]
Poetry Across Time Zones, War, Home [Nov 21, 2008]
Too Much Nutmeg [Dec 9, 2008]
On This Idea of Hope [Jan 20, 2009]
What Happiness Looks Like [May 1, 2009]
Soundtrack [Jun 18, 2009]
The Trouble with Hello Is Goodbye [Jul 19, 2009]
The Sky Is As Big As Memory [Aug 1, 2009]
Vicki Topaz
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