Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, selected by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes
Louisiana Requiem
Eight months pregnant when your mother began hospice,
you sat in the driveway, belly ovoid as an imperial Fabergé
egg on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, or so you joked
with your dying mother whose love of metaphor shone
through the morphine fog and night air in Baton Rouge,
thick with magnolia three days gone and the sweeter
tang of silverbell: fecund humid buzzing air a soft coverlet
over your swollen limbs. You sat, mulling the bald
cypress trees older than your grandpa who made the old
money selling insurance in the New South. A way,
he said, selling it, of investing in one’s blood, one’s kith
and kin, the next generation, whatever the Lord saw
fit to happen. Money, firm as a pillared manse, this grand
house turned palliative, which is to care for without
curing, cognate with pall and pallbearer, cloak and carrier
of the coffin before earth’s coverlet brings the body
home to its colder self. Just now, giving your mother water
and hummed song, you cushion the earthward journey,
her accession to gravity, longing in aqueous eyes, turned
inward and unseeing. All the while, the child inside
you assumes her own gravity, plotting descent, though her
head is stuck stubbornly under your ribs, her feet locked
against the pelvic gate. To carry a child, to bear the borning,
first labor of the endless labors, to concede to the gravity
of love’s body: those nights, sitting outside your mother’s dying
room, warm earth pressed against the backs of your bare
legs, your hand running over knobbed ribs of cobblestones
your father set down, years ago, in some Roman fancy
of having a drive like the Appian Way: timeless, enduring.
There, in earshot of the night nurse, you let night
envelop you in its perfume, blended scent a pagan incense,
the worship of nature and of the moon, rounding like
the child inside you, dimpling its impervious face as you
pray for the pain to recede from your mother’s body
and for the body, receding. And you are an entire country,
an America, stretched impossibly across a Mason Dixon
and two shores, nearing: the woman who bore you, daughter
you will bear, your body a hinge between its history
and future, an imperfect present tense. Scientist, dedicated
to cool notice of detailed fact, resistant to the muddled
logic of metaphor, you nonetheless find yourself borne
across by likeness in otherwise radical difference:
the shared violence that marks birth and death, mothering
the grade that governs the latitudes of the in-between.
Mother, no placid person or thing, but a rugged engine,
suing for peace: to bring forth a world from a fallen
world as a child from the long dark veins. Mother a river,
inexhaustible as water; a song of warmth and warning;
a map for the body, politic; a long cobbled road, umbilical,
built to outlast wreck and ruin, the death of empire.
Weather
A small rain down can rain but I am not outside, beside
an aluminum mouth of a gushing gutter, watching
the city sluiced in the casual event of falling water.
Nor am I standing in a shale of rubble, circled by dead
children’s toys, or crouched in a buckling raft, crusted
in cold salt and urine, chattel in a game of rockets
and gas. I breathe from two lungs, integral; my legs
warm under blankets’ nightly benediction. And love
lies sleeping, unharmed and unarmed beside me, arc
of his shoulder familiar as landscape to a painter whose
hands remember the curves of two cleaved hills, forelock
of treeline, wild mane of sky. I trace hollow shadows
in a dark naming of parts as if my lover were a getaway
horse: throatlatch, barrel, and cannon; pastern, gaskin,
and hock. Tender, the names given to boats and beasts
of burden, what carries us from dock to ocean, trailhead
to highway, midnight to morning, censure to pleasure:
fugitives from dreamt disasters. My beloved of nape,
buttock, and thigh; or stern, winch, and turnbuckle; or
dock, loin, and withers: in your body’s boat, I stow trust
for safe passage while distant wars make their incursions,
violence sends its newsworthy summons, and weather makes
a music of time. A small rain down can rain and by luck, Christ,
or zeitgeist, I cradle him in sleep’s long sail toward morning.
Seabirds
And how they angle their bodies over water
with tensile intention, masters of hover
and swoop, dart and splay.
Technique in these storm-petrels at the level
of instinct which, watching from shore, we
might mistake as pleasure,
claiming each elegant instance of nature
as something ultimately about ourselves,
not a good meal’s necessary
murder, the calculus of want that drives
a beak’s precision. In the foreshortened
days before solstice,
the business of sleep hardly put away before
we are, at midday, craving it again: a retreat
into warmth from the low
dark that comes over cape houses and marsh
in the startling cold of matchstick December
and the shirred mirror
of a half-frozen salt bay. We sat in a warm
car, watching the last hour of light ravish
then subtract itself from
the winded tapestry of reeds, the slick backs
of the feeding petrels. We admit to envying
their honed vision,
their eyes’ detection of the flicker of fin,
as known to them as a mate’s plumage.
How have we arrived
at early mid-life to find desires opaque,
dimmed to a decibel beyond hearing?
In the scripts that fell,
hidden mantles, on the children we once
were, in early grief of knowing we were
wrong, from the start,
unable to trust in the unseen; or to see without
seeing to the point of pain; to bear, willingly,
the brunt of family
ambition and name into regard if not renown.
To fear, even then, the ostracon of tribal shun
and to have shaped
a twinned existence, giving to Caesar in accord
with his remand, while hiding a spare and shiny
penny, bright as a bird’s
eye, as our own. The petrels’ theater is governed
by nature: they act in concert with belly and bone.
They are not otherwise,
abroad or at home, they do not shirk from violence
in algorithmic continuance. Their songs’ necessity
a midwinter music.
Heather Treseler’s Parturition (2020) received the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize, and her sequence of poems, “The Lucie Odes,” won The Missouri Review‘s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Her poems appear in Boston Review, Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, and Harvard Review, and her essays appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, PN Review, and in seven books of criticism. She is an associate professor of English at Worcester State University.