A Thursday Afternoon In January While on Sabbatical
Nicole Santalucia
is the same as that drug bust twenty-five years ago when the
police knocked, then banged, then circled the property. I
emptied my pockets, invited the cops in for a pot of coffee.
This is where I detach with love and reattach it over there,
which is how I structure my day while our mother waits
outside your hospital room. Thursday crackles. Each exhale
like wallpaper peeling off plaster. I must have swallowed the
whole plastic bag of your innards. While you brush your teeth,
the nurse suctions your mouth. If fluid soaks into the sponges,
you'll drown. The heart in my stomach leaks. Did you happen
to pump an extra gallon of blood? This afternoon, I got a little
dizzy. Scar tissue forms on the windows. What if you rip in
half again? How many times can you cheat life? Is this how we
get caught? Will I get arrested if I regurgitate a pair of lungs
and a liver? Suck air and blow it out. If my confession hasn't
changed, is everyone still hiding upstairs? The old it's-not-me
trick is up my sleeve, and I have long sleeves that wrap around
my waist. I tie myself to Thursday and pull the minutes closer.
If I yank hard enough, will garbage day arrive sooner? Is it less
about rotting and more about purging? Does it work like an
Adam's apple? Here I go again trying to remove the gullet of
death. My throat fell out. Did some stupid story about a god
get trapped in your chest? For all we know, one of us is living
and one of us is dead and one of us is a bowhead whale holding
its breath.
from the journal COLORADO REVIEW
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Composite image of Jan Beatty's headshot and the cover of her new book, Dragstripping
Jan Beatty on How the Past Suffuses the Present

"In her latest collection, Dragstripping (University of Pittsburgh Press), Jan Beatty includes numerous poems about her father, who died almost 40 years ago, in 1986. 'I keep thinking that I’m done with him, and it just keeps happening....I’m still wearing my father’s ring. I’m still very close to him. I’m not going to turn it down. I’m grateful that I’m still getting poems. I don’t want to put them in the book unless they’ve earned their way.'"

via PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER
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Cover image of Joyelle McSweeney's book, Death Styles
What Sparks Poetry: Joyelle McSweeney on "Death Style 2.8.21 (Mary Magdalene, Collectible Glasses)"

I wrote all the poems of Death Styles on the shockwave of catastrophic grief, trying to understand the physics of my new, confounding planet, a planet clammy with calamity, with weed beds and reed beds, NICU wards, of cause decoupled from event. I think of irreparability, a loss that runs only one way, converting my skull to a locked vault, a cave. Can you witness absence? How does the individual body, immobilized by calamity, become a place to which sound and consequence flood?”

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