These three poems by Carolyn Gevinski meditate on the way we confront violence — from childhood to adulthood — and how we reclaim our ability to see beauty in the world around us, against the odds…
bu: Carolyn Gevinski
People who carry suitcases
People who carry suitcases
also appreciate pigeons
and skeletons of townhouses
set against an afternoon sun.
They have cinnamon-colored freckles,
almost no personal belongings,
and always forget their chargers
whose necks are wire and bruised.
Travelers married to the skies
enjoy the comic of religion
and find their prayers endearing,
plastered to grandmother’s walls.
My runaway with his suitcase
leaves me scripted candy rings
and folded German newspapers,
which lift my eyes to the sky.
Afar
They built the bridge so his feet
would stand in the mud forever,
elevating hermit crab cars.
The earthquake strums a chord,
spraying them into the river,
and he snaps in half, relieved.
From my window, I hear him speak:
serves them right
for birthing a gray-skinned giant,
then chaining it to the ground.
They wrote books for a generation
about bearded men who
drop bombs shaped like presents
on shattered children.
When the word bravery did not
look like a lightening bolt scar,
but a photo of an infant amputee,
those children hollered.
The money-braised authors
turned their heads.
And it’s been a few weeks now,
I’ve been feeling well again,
so I press my nose to the cheese grater
and slough off my skin.
When the doctor asks why I did it,
I answer that we bred pigeons
to carry our most important messages,
then invented the cell phone.
“And why,” I ask the doctor,
“do I deserve to feel joy?”
I once knew a young man
who now lives in a skyscraper.
From his height, the bridge
is nothing more than a cobweb.
His laugh is an ugly sound
when he calls the birds “rats with wings.”
But he is kinder to them than the children,
who he pretends are a “hoax”
and a “machine.”
My teacher spoke of a city
where tongues twisted like kissing
and religion was not a hydra,
but a twisting, glittering stream.
When the bridge first spoke to me,
I couldn’t help but wonder,
if they ever bothered asking
the minarets or the sky
before taking away their children.
The Party
They are going to a party, mother says.
But Emma hates stockings, and she won’t (won’t! won’t!)
Charlotte is good. Charlotte pulls her tights up over her belly button all on her own.
Look at that, mother says. Charlotte pulls her tights up over her belly button on her own.
Emma looks at Charlotte’s belly button. Charlotte has an innie. Emma does not. But the freckle below their navel is much the same, and their gray eyes are much the same, and there are two markings on the wall that measure forty-three inches each.
We are going to a party. The stockings itch.
Mother glances at the clock above the mantel. Fine. One of the twins will be stockingless and the other will be good, and that is how the rest of the family will tell them apart.
Aside from their stockings and belly buttons, Emma and Charlotte are identical in Mary Janes.
Is it a birthday party? Sort of.
The party smells funny, Emma thinks. Like pickles. And cousin Jean sleeps in the center.
Will there be cake? Hush. There will be later.
The girls dart through a thicket of steamed trousers. A run in the carpet, which Charlotte stumbles over. Rolls like floured dough. The carpet smells like skin. Pickles and skin.
Charlotte never cries when she falls. Emma always cries. A woman’s cotton underwear. White and white! On all of this black? You would think their underwear would match all of this black.
Emma!
Emma glances at their mother, then scurries to where her sister lays, spine to carpet. They stare, as if at the stars. Polka dots and lace. Snow white and blood red.
Mother yanks them by the skin of their necks like kittens, marches them to the front row. Their father turns his cheek. Little Jean sleeps.
A man in a dress speaks to the silence. The thrum of a distant storm. His voice weighs on Charlotte’s eyelids. Maybe this is a sleeping party, she thinks. She tugs on Emma’s arm. Maybe this is a sleeping party.
Why would anyone throw a sleeping party?
Charlotte shrugs. Emma sticks her thumb in her mouth, and this time, mother doesn’t yank it away. Later, in the rock garden, Emma and Charlotte search for four leaf clovers.
Then they eat cake. Tongue and cheek and sugared violets.
One more beer? The condensation pools around the rim. Uncle Henry’s laugh booms.
You know one of the last things she ever said to me? Jeanie asks me, Daddy, do vampires sleep in coffins? I told her, I'm not sure, I’ve never met a vampire. She says, Daddy, I think I’d like to be a vampire. She said, Daddy, vampires live forever. I think I’d like to be a vampire. And at night, Uncle Henry laughs a little and there’s green in his eyes when he looks down on the children. At night, I dream that there are little fangs in my neck. My little ghost, with little fangs.
—bedtime! Mother says.
One more drink never killed no one, Emma pipes.
See what you’re teaching them?
Mother’s hand is warm on Emma’s back. She pokes their cheeks. Don’t forget these back here.
Charlotte peels off her stockings.
It was a fun party, Emma says. Mother kisses her forehead.
Will we eat sugared violets again tomorrow?
Carolyn Gevinski’s poems have been published in Lavender Review and are forthcoming in Scapegoat Review. Her journalism can be found in El País, GLAMOUR, Grassroots Magazine, Al Jazeera, and Out Magazine. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, where she currently works on their postgraduate investigative team.
